The Boy Who Played with Fusion: Extreme Science, Extreme Parenting and How to Make a Star - Softcover

“Here is the amazing story of an unbelievable boy—somebody who seems more like a figure out of fiction (science fiction, to be specific) than reality. But the story is true, the boy is true, and the science is true. And the world that opens up to us through his story is both fascinating and slightly terrifying . . . but in a good way. You won’t be able to walk away from this tale.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love and The Signature of All Things
“Imagine if cartoon whiz-kid Jimmy Neutron were real and had a brainchild with MacGyver and his adolescence got told as a rollicking bildungsroman about American prodigies and DIY nuclear reactors—well, that’s this book.” —Jack Hitt, author of Bunch of Amateurs                          
“Clynes guides us on an engrossing journey to the outer realms of science and parenting, The Boy Who Played with Fusion is a fascinating exploration of ‘giftedness’ and all its consequences.” —Paul Greenberg, author of Four Fish and American Catch

How an American teenager became the youngest person ever to build a working nuclear fusion reactor 

By the age of nine, Taylor Wilson had mastered the science of rocket propulsion. At eleven, his grandmother’s cancer diagnosis inspired him to investigate new ways to produce medical isotopes. And by fourteen, Wilson had built a 500-million-degree reactor and become the youngest person in history to achieve nuclear fusion. How could someone so young achieve so much, and what can Wilson’s story teach parents and teachers about how to support high-achieving kids?

In The Boy Who Played with Fusion, science journalist Tom Clynes narrates Taylor Wilson’s extraordinary journey—from his Arkansas home where his parents fully supported his intellectual passions, to a unique Reno, Nevada, public high school just for academic superstars, to the present, when now twenty-one-year-old Wilson is winning international science competitions with devices designed to prevent terrorists from shipping radioactive material into the country. Along the way, Clynes reveals how our education system shortchanges gifted students, and what we can do to fix it.