The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America

by John D. Gartner

Movies were the only industry to see an increase in business during the Depression.

Myron created a new profession: the talent agent.

shook off rejection like a spaniel out of water and regrouped his forces.

Diagnostically, this unmistakable evidence of psychosis means that David must be considered a bipolar type I, a manic-depressive in the classical sense.

David may have been going mad, but he was a mad genius.

For a second act, David had waiting in the wings two talents he had discovered on his travels in Europe: Alfred Hitchcock and Ingrid Bergman.

By challenging this sleepy scientific bureaucracy, Venter had transformed it into an avenging army. This must be counted as among his most impressive achievements. To some, it was a mystery how Venter generated such explosive animus. None was more mystified than Venter himself.

“We all want to believe in something bigger than ourselves,” Venter told me, and Celera tapped into that idealism. “I’m able to articulate a vision. I try to inspire people to be driven by what is possible and do it.”

the only times Kowalski recalled seeing Venter depressed were during comparatively peaceful periods. “I’ve often been surprised at the times he’s been depressed. They were lulls, when we weren’t rallying against something…. He likes the challenge of a difficult situation. There is something about those sorts of moments that he derives energy from.”

But diagnosing these leaders as narcissistic personalities does nothing to explain the other important traits Conger has identified: increased energy, creativity, restlessness, impulsivity, and risk taking. Hypomania explains them all.

Virtually every new movement in human history—religious, political, intellectual, and economic—has been led by a charismatic leader.

Hypomania is the common thread that connects these world changers, a thread as invisible, as powerful, and stretching back as far in time as a strand of DNA.

Venter has called himself “a super enzyme” because “I catalyze things.”105 That’s probably a good description of the function hypomanics like Venter play in society.

Venter predicted that a day would soon come when there would be a retail market for individual genomes.

As the Marquis de Lafayette said when he first landed on American soil during the Revolution, he had come “to conquer or perish!” The hypomanic is wired this way: Give me greatness or give me death.

“I don’t think Craig wants to get up in the morning if he’s not doing something earth-shattering. What’s the point?” asked Shreeve. Venter agreed with that statement: “Everything is goal-oriented.

Throw away the goals, and I’d be depressed. I have to have a goal to exist. I look at the majority of civilization, and they just exist from day to day. Sometimes I’m env...

For the hypomanic, the only escape from a black hole is a big bang.

The cure to cancer exists on the level of the genome.

The growth of cells is controlled by a complex series of checks and balances embedded in our genes.

Some proteins initiate cell growth; others mod...

In cancer, this system has broken down, and cells reproduce rampantly. The cure may be as simple as finding the pro...

The field of regenerative medicine is in its infancy.

NIH researcher Ronald McKay believes that “people will routinely be reconstituting liver, regenerating heart, routinely building pancreatic islets, routinely putting cells into the brain that get incorporated into normal circuitry. They will routinely rebuild all tissues.”

Such changes will dramatically increase our l...

For most of human history, the average person lived to age twenty-five, basically long enough to reproduce. Our average life span has been steadily on the rise, with improvements in nutrition, sanitation, ...

In 1900, the average life expectancy was fifty. Now it is in the mid-eighties in industrialized nations. Clearly, the elimination of cancer and advances in regenerative medicine will push that average higher. But genetic research on aging itse...

by turning on genes that activate regeneration and turning off others that activate aging.138 Stopping the aging process might be as simple as taking a pill.

Today’s scientists would not be surprised if our grandchildren lived to 120. But ultimately, there is no absolute limit that we know of.

The last question I asked Craig Venter was: How is this genome go...

“It’s the beginning of the beginning,” he answered. “This is the quiet revolution. The digital revolution was in your face. The genome revolution is behind the scenes, slowly transforming how we think about life, how we treat disease, how we organize our lives, how we view our history. It’s going to change how we live, from the food we ea...

They built them and used their handmade genes to successfully produce a well-known simple virus—phiX, the first organism to ever have its gene sequence decoded. They created life. Venter nicknamed it the “Genesis Project.”140

The DOE had funded their work, hoping it would yield designer microorganisms capable of producing hydrogen fuel, devouring oil spills, and gobbling up greenhouse gases.

“With this advance, it is easier to imagine, in the not-too-distant future, a colony of specially designed microbes living within the emission-control system of a coal-fired plant, consuming its pollution and its carbon dioxide, or employing microbes to radically reduce water pollution, or to reduce the toxic effects of radioactive waste.”

Up until 2003, only God could claim to have created life. The Almighty must now share that honor with a hypomanic American.

Any group of Homo sapiens without bipolar genes in its gene pool long ago went the way of the Kahama.

The impulse to conquer has been directed toward more abstract, sublimated, and civilized goals but has remained, in its basic structure, unchanged for millions of years.

The paradox is that the traits that push mankind toward continuous advancement are really quite primitive.

Hypomanics are on this earth for good reason. And I predict that if we take them out of the gene pool, tomorrow’s Christopher Columbuses will never be born, and our descendants won’t find their new worlds.