The prodigy’s hair is sticking up.
As he strolls into the tiny kitchen, 13-year-old Sho Yano is met by the disapproving eyes of his mother, who quickly pats down the errant patch of black hair. Moments later, he grabs the brown-bag lunch she prepared, jumps in the passenger seat of the family car, argues with his 7-year-old sister over which classical music CD to play and heads off to another day at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine.
Sho created a stir in 2000 when he entered Loyola University at the age of 9 and graduated summa cum laude just three years later. His admission into Pritzker last fall revived the debate among parents and educators about whether someone that young is emotionally prepared for college.
Since he was a toddler, Sho has been exceptional, shocking primary school teachers and his parents with his uncanny ability to absorb all kinds of information. As a young boy, his IQ measured above 200, putting him well into the genius range.
He’s so bright, in fact, that you can sometimes forget he’s still a 13-year-old boy in the midst of puberty who teases his sister mercilessly, keeps a stack of Beanie Babies stuffed in his closet and likes showing off the miniature dinosaur model on display in his small bedroom in the student apartment he shared with his family.
In his application essay to the U. of C., Sho addressed the scrutiny he faced as a young boy on Loyola’s campus in his typically formal and studied way: “The principal challenging situation I encountered was bias due to my age and appearance, entering a university at age 9,” he wrote. “Once, a person yelled insults at me from a distance on campus. For a course assignment, one student read out loud her essay arguing that a young child should not attend college. This course of events was capped by the librarian’s refusal to allow me to check out material for my classes, despite inspecting my student identification card with my photograph. However, I dealt with this situation, keeping myself positive, and eventually ‘fit in’ with the other students, who learned to accept me as their peer.”
He arrived at the U. of C.’s Hyde Park campus last June hoping to do the same there.
In those early days, he was a rail-thin, studious-looking boy who was confident but sometimes painfully shy. He struggled at times to make eye contact with strangers and visitors, and often spoke in a barely audible tone. “The first week in classes, there were all these mysterious smiles,” says classmate Jie Chen. “He’d just smile and look down like a Cheshire cat.”
Sho is one of just 10 students in the university’s combined MD/PhD program. Most years, the small group quickly builds tight bonds. With Sho on board, the bonding took a slightly different course. Instead of spending hours at taverns with his classmates, Sho joined a classmate or two for a bike ride or accompanied them for dinner while his mother waited in the car downstairs. During the group’s first retreat, other students sipped wine. “But we always made sure we had milk for Sho,” Chen joked.
In those first weeks, Sho surprised some of his classmates with his sense of humor, as he chided friends for going out drinking after a class lecture on the dangers of alcohol.
While Sho was slightly less social outside class, inside the classroom he was clearly an equal. Some classmates and professors had expected a nerdy kid with his hand constantly raised, eager to prove he knew all the answers. Instead, he was quietly brilliant.
“It’s amazing how great his thought processes are,” Chen says. “Sometimes he knows the answer before the professor. . . . Overall, we really benefit from his comments.”
But there were awkward moments early on. Among them was a visit to campus from James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA’s molecular structure and recipient of the 1962 Nobel Prize. Watson enrolled at U. of C. in 1943 as a 15-year-old. University officials arranged a special meeting with Watson for Sho, which frustrated at least one medical student who complained that it was unfair to give him special treatment.
After word of the complaint traveled down to Sho’s family, his father fired off an e-mail attempting to shore up his son’s confidence.
“If you do well, people get jealous. If you do badly, people laugh at you. If you stay the same as others, people ignore you. Do you change who you are because of people? No. If you change, you are not you anymore, you become a leaf blown away by the wind from the mouth of people who do not know you, do not really care about you, and are very busy for their own self interests.”
Some child-development experts feel strongly that a student as young as Sho should not be in medical school. Julian Stanley, professor emeritus of psychology and founder of the Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins University, is among them. Stanley generally advises against admitting students to college before they are 16.
One of his biggest concerns is that universities may exploit children to boost their image with a “genius in residence.” At the same time, he says, overzealous parents may be looking to stroke their egos. “They’re exhibitionist parents. I call them ‘creator’ parents. Sometimes they’re trying to create a genius,” Stanley says.
He argues that there are many opportunities for exceptional children today, including the chance to take more than 30 advanced-placement classes in high school, as well as community college courses and university Internet classes.
Having worked with some of the country’s best-known academic prodigies since 1971, Stanley says young students who skipped high school and moved through college courses quickly fared no better than those who took a slower approach.
We’ve seen cases where it failed outright,” he says. “One kid finished college at 12. He got a couple master’s degrees but he never got a doctorate. He was so shy he could barely function. . . . This can be quite harmful to a kid. What you may find is at age 40, they’re not too happy with themselves.”
On the other hand, some gifted-education advocates embrace early college admittance and applaud the U. of C. for giving a prodigy the chance to pursue his dream. “To take a student through the natural [school] progression when the student is already five or six grades ahead would be foolish,” says Joan Smutney, director of the Center for Gifted at National-Louis University in Evanston.
Other prodigies who entered college early say they desperately needed a more rigorous curriculum than high school could offer.
Balamurali Ambati graduated from high school at 11, earned his bachelor’s degree in biology from New York University at 13, graduated from Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York at 17 and went on to a residency at Harvard in ophthalmology. He’s still listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the youngest person ever to become a doctor.
As in Sho’s case, Ambati and his parents were harshly criticized all along the way. “The hardest part about it was convincing people to let me do it,” he says. “There was a lot of administrative inertia. A lot of people didn’t want this to happen . . . . When people win an Olympic gold medal at 14, they’re celebrated,” he observes. “But excellence in academics unfortunately is not valued.”
Ambati was 16 when he first saw patients, and he thinks they didn’t realize how young he was. Now 26, he is director of the cornea service at the Medical College of Georgia. He says he didn’t miss out on anything by skipping ahead. “I was in a public high school. I watched cartoons, ‘Star Trek,’ went to movies and played basketball. I think I did have a normal life, and I think I still do.”
UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh started his undergraduate studies at UCLA at 12 and graduated at 15 with bachelor’s degrees in math and computer science. He wrote software programs and worked for software companies before entering law school at 21 and later clerking for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
He says missing out on a “typical” childhood was not really an issue for him, nor does he expect it to be for Sho.
“He might feel left out of social plans at times,” Volokh says. “He’ll be a 13-year-old going through puberty surrounded by very attractive women who are probably unavailable to him. That’s what being a 13-year-old is all about.
“If this boy is really interested in being a doctor, and [he is] able to do it eight years earlier when he might be at the most energetic and productive years of his life, that is something tremendously important.”
Cole Miller, an associate professor of astronomy at the University of Maryland at College Park, went to Hillsdale College in Michigan at 12. Early on, he met a group of football players and befriended them. “It must have been a sight: me, at 5 foot 2, with all these 6 foot 4, 250-pound mammoth human beings.”
Miller appreciated the challenge of college, but later he wondered about one missed aspect of his childhood. “There are times when I wish I had had a little bit of toughening [from being in junior and senior high school],” he says. “Some of those experiences, although very, very painful and difficult to deal with at the time, occur in relatively innocuous settings that set you up for the future.”
The University of Chicago did give Sho’s application a closer look because of his age. He met with triple the number of professors and students compared with typical applicants. In the end, he left the strong impression that he was an exceptional and mature student eager to move on. There was a slight change to his course of studies, allowing him to take more of his doctoral research at the beginning of his studies and more medical training at the end. By the time he sees patients, he’ll likely be 17.
“Doogie Howser was very cute on television but the reality is, how will patients react? How do you handle a pelvic exam or a breast exam?” says Dr. Bennett Leventhal, a U. of C. psychiatrist who interviewed Sho and recommended the adjustment.
Academically, Sho’s qualifications easily matched those of other students applying to the university’s medical scientist-in-training program leading to both an MD and a PhD. He had perfect scores in the quantitative and analytical sections of his graduate school admissions test. His Medical College Admissions Test scores-13 or 14 out of 15 for each of the sections-were stellar. And he had defied critics by graduating from Loyola in three years, earning highest honors.
Nonetheless, there are lingering concerns. Although Leventhal calls Sho “remarkable,” he believes he should be monitored closely. “The other concern I had, and still have, is what happens to his childhood? What happens to the kinds of things children do? And how much of that does he really need?”
After a few months in medical school, Sho began opening up more. He started playing basketball with other students, accompanied classmates to lunches and dinners, and volunteered at the Ronald McDonald House, helping to support families of pediatric patients at the hospital. He also kept up with daily piano practice and tae kwon do lessons (he’s a black belt).
Over lunch in late fall, he told a visitor that he wasn’t overwhelmed by the mound of reading assignments, and that he was still sleeping eight to 10 hours each night, which astonished classmates who were getting by with half that.
But the awkwardness of a typical 13-year-old was still there. During a class discussion last winter, Sho was cautious in responding to questions posed by the gray-haired professor at the head of the room:
What about modern medical procedures keeping a child alive at $15,000 a day? As a doctor, do you have a responsibility to society for the cost of the medical services you recommend? Should the performance of doctors-based on the medical outcomes of their patients-be posted on Web sites?
For many questions, Sho remained silent.
Finally, he spoke in a quiet voice. “I was supporting it,” he said of the physician-ratings Web site. “I thought it would provide a good incentive for physicians to provide better care. . . . It’s putting medicine in a business model.”
When the professor, Dr. Lawrence Casalino, added follow-up questions, and asked if it was a good idea overall, the prodigy retreated a bit. “I don’t know,” he replied.
But in other settings, such as a comfortable lunch with medical school classmate Luka Pocivavsek, Sho couldn’t stop talking about some of the same issues. Leaning over a bowl of soup, he said he couldn’t understand why his classmates dwelled so much on the gray areas in discussions of medical care.
He insisted he would never make his patients’ complications sound worse just to move someone up on a transplant list. Classmates kept pressing him on what he’d do if his mother were the patient, he said, but he felt it was an unfair question.
“If everyone would stop gaming the system, the system would actually work and people could actually stop gaming the system,” he said, his voice rising.
Pocivavsek pressed him: Who would he give priority to for a liver transplant-a 75-year-old or an 8-year-old?
“I don’t really like arguing about social choices,” Sho said.
“But you have to make these calls all the time,” Pocivavsek said.
The two talked medical ethics for more than an hour, delighting in the debate.
“I knew he’d be smart when it came to science. But Sho thinks so much about social and political issues and then makes up his mind,” Pocivavsek told a visitor.
Then he turned to Sho: “It would be great if more people your age thought like that. Whatever your parents did, they did a good job.”
The job of raising Sho has never been easy for the Yanos, who both have advanced degrees and intense intellectual interests.
His mother, Kyung, is a Korean immigrant with a master’s degree in art history. Sho’s father, Katsura, is president of the U.S. office of the Japanese company Fujitrans. Katsura’s job brought him and his family to Chicago from California when Sho was 9. After Sho entered Loyola, the father had to return to California, so the Yanos agreed on a commuter marriage to let their son pursue medical school where he most wanted to be. They’ve made similar sacrifices since Sho was a boy.
The parents say their own talents never matched the brilliance of their son, and they had trouble figuring out how best to educate him.
At first, it was Sho’s attachment to music that stood out. At 3, his little fingers found a welcome place at the piano, even with complicated pieces by Chopin. By 4, he was composing his own music.
Then came kindergarten and later, a school for the gifted. Sho breezed through it all, his mother says. At 7, she decided to home school him to keep his thirst for knowledge satisfied.
But he craved more, plowing through complex science and literary texts. He especially loved science fiction and anything by C.S. Lewis. By 8, he scored a combined 1,500 out of a possible 1,600 on the Scholastic Aptitude Tests.
Sho was ready for college at 7, his mother says, but she wouldn’t let him apply until he was 9. She talked with officials at Northwestern, who she says discouraged her from applying. But Loyola offered Sho a welcome hand and a scholarship.
Criticism of the decision to send Sho to college early was painful for his mother. She recalls sitting at a lunch table on Loyola’s campus one Sunday morning and hearing a professor complain about Sho, claiming that he would have lifelong emotional scars. The critics surfaced again when Sho applied to medical schools. One administrator in California accused Kyung of using her son to set a world record.
But Kyung says she’s finally learning to ignore the scrutiny. “Many people think Sho was pushed by his parents to go to college at age 9 and have academic success,” Kyung says. “However, we believe that when someone is pushed to become accomplished, the results are more negative than positive. When I taught Sho, he always had fun in learning.”
A book she wrote on how she raised Sho was titled by her Korean publisher, “How to Raise a Little Einstein: A Half-Step Ahead of Your Child’s Ability,” but Kyung says it was about challenging children but not so much that you frustrate them.
The Yanos say they’ve done what they could to give Sho a normal childhood. He played soccer while a young boy in California, but his mother never encouraged him to take it further, as it took time away from piano practice. She laments that many of Sho’s childhood friends gave up the piano for soccer and then lost their love for music.
“Soccer never stays with children for a lifetime,” she says. “But music-this is the kind of thing that’s developing his mind and soul. This will be something that will be with him for a lifetime.”
Although Sho visits childhood pals and church members his age in California, his closest friends are his medical school colleagues. That crowd is nearly twice his age, and many of their lives are at much different stages. One got married this year, and while the rest of his group attended the out-of-town wedding, Sho stayed behind. His mother didn’t want the others to have to look after him through the weekend.
When he’s with his classmates, Sho can blend in easily, talking science. But when he’s with his sister, Sayuri, he’s a 13-year-old again. Sayuri, a delicate girl with long black hair who recently turned 8, has multiple talents-in music and academics-that rival even those of her exceptional brother. She too has been home schooled for much of her young life, so the two have spent a lot of time together.
Sho chases his sister around the apartment or the lobby of Roosevelt University, where they both have Saturday afternoon music lessons. During lunch, he sometimes draws pictures with her and fights over who gets to keep a squiggly child’s straw.
And like the typical big brother, he goads Sayuri when she scours the apartment looking for her coat. “I threw it in the toilet!” he says with a smile.
For Sho’s first year of medical school, his routine followed a basic pattern: breakfast with his mother and Sayuri, classes much of the day, then study in the late afternoon and evening at his family’s apartment.
Until late spring, the Yanos lived in a three-bedroom, graduate-student apartment, whose small living area was dominated by a black Kawai grand piano that seemed to always have a Yano child perched on its bench.
Even after a long day at medical school, Kyung never fails to remind her son to keep practicing his piano.
“Did you do at least an hour?” she asks one winter afternoon when Sho has wandered into the bedroom where she and his sister are working math problems. “Did you do Bach?”
He shakes his head no.
“Do, Sho,” she says, laughing. “You try to cheat!”
Sho just smiles and returns to the piano.
Kyung tutors Sayuri in 8th grade-level math and beginning algebra. This summer, Sayuri will be ready for high school work and will probably enter college early as well, but perhaps not as early as Sho.
During one study session, Kyung compared samples of Sho’s and Sayuri’s writing to show that her daughter’s was not yet college level. The three-page story is a sweet recollection of her father and the things he has done to make his daughter laugh. It has no spelling or grammatical errors and is written in neat, perfectly formed letters. At the same age, Sho was writing full-blown analyses of historical events.
As Sho’s first year at Pritzker drew to a close this spring, he once again confounded the expectations of those who predicted a stumble, if not a fall. In his courses with letter scores-including cell biology, genetic analysis and cancer biology-he earned all A’s. The medical school classes are pass/fail, and he passed them all. He was able to skip a tough medical genetics course after acing a preliminary exam.
He also managed to impress a demanding set of professors. “He was among the very best in the class,” says Douglas Bishop, associate professor of radiation and cellular oncology. “Just as important, he seemed very comfortable sitting there with the other students. He asked questions in class that were appropriate and insightful, and he performed at a level that was consistent with the best students we get here.”
Sho is gravitating toward cell research, which could lead to cancer studies or stem cell research, and he insists that he’s not worried about all the attention and scrutiny that surrounds him. “I don’t set expectations for myself to be great,” he says one afternoon over a hot dog lunch in a quiet corner on the 4th floor of the Biological Sciences Building, where most of his classes are held. “I just want to do the best I can and study what I like.”
But even some of Sho’s biggest fans think the real test will come later in the program, when as a teenager he’ll juggle the demands of intense research and patient care. “The question that crowds my mind is somebody might be very good and fit for book learning,” Bishop says. “But is he ready for the other aspects that are involved? I can’t really tell that yet.”
In May, near the end of the school year, Sho found a most unusual way to connect with the personal side of medical care. The occasion was a memorial service, “A Time of Remembrance,” which was dedicated to families who had lost loved ones to cancer at the U. of C. in the last year.
Dozens of families squeezed into chairs, clutching tissues and yellow flowers bearing the names of the deceased, and medical students read poems and sang. At the front of the room was a display of photos of those who had died, many of them young and smiling, in the prime of their lives.
In the program book, under the title “Musical Meditation,” Sho Yano was listed as the performer.
“This service is to honor your loved ones and to celebrate their lives,” Rev. Kyle Nash told the audience. She knew that Sho’s musical talent would touch them. “His performance is full of all the texture and richness of actual human communication, but he does it through music,” she explained. “He’s really quite incredible.”
Sho approached the piano in a black suit and distinctive white bow tie. He played an arresting Franz Schubert piece, his slender body upright as his fingers flew across the keys. There was tenderness and passion in every note, and in the audience, tears flowed.
