The Myth of the Lone Genius

As a devotee of the finer arts of television, I recently watched an episode of that masterpiece of the small screen, Star Trek: The Next Generation. The most brilliant human in the galaxy, Dr. Ira Graves, had intentionally marooned himself on a distant planet to focus on his work, but he has to call on the Enterprise for assistance when he becomes ill. He’d brought along a single assistant and for decades toiled away in complete isolation from the scientific community, eventually discovering how to digitize human consciousness.

So what is the most outlandish part of this premise? Here’s a few candidates that you may have thought of: