Sat 23 November 2019:
A nine-year-old Belgian boy, with an IQ of 145, is on track to become the world’s youngest university graduate.
Laurent Simons is set to complete a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at Eindhoven’s University of Technology next month.
Inspired by Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla, he plans to research artificial organs, and ultimately develop an entire artificial body in his own laboratory.
“My grandparents are heart patients,” he explained of the choice.
Laurent looks much like any other child of his age. Then he starts describing his work at a university in the Netherlands, developing a computer circuit that will replicate a part of the brain.
“What we are doing is placing neurons and making connections to see what the reaction is to medication in a part of the brain,” he says of the brain-on-chip project, which combines the biomedical and electrical engineering fields.
Laurent, who was born in Belgium but now lives in the Netherlands, completed high school in roughly a year.
In university, he is set to finish a three-year bachelor’s programme in just nine months.
“He’s maybe three times smarter than the smartest student we’ve ever had,” said programme director Sjoerd Hulshof.
Currently the youngest person to obtain a college degree is American Michael Kearney, who achieved the feat in June 1994 at the age of ten years and four months, according to the Guinness Book of World Records.
When he is not at the university, Laurent says he walks the dog, plays video games Minecraft and Fortnite, or posts pictures on Instagram.
Offers are flooding in from universities around the world for Laurent and his parents are helping him weigh the options, with the US west coast currently a favourite destination.
His father, Alexander, does not dare predict Laurent’s future because he has smashed every expectation so far – but stressed there was no hurry.
While Laurent is studying in the labs of the university, his best friends are playing tag in the playground of his old school in the Belgian coastal resort of Ostend.
Laurent, wearing a rollneck jumper, jeans and trainers, himself says that “I don’t really miss primary school, but I still have friends there.”
He was raised in Ostend by his grandparents until the start of this year, as his parents Alexander and Lydia were “busy with work” in the Netherlands.
Starting school at four, he completed primary in a year and a half. It has taken him just five years to go through primary and secondary school and university.
“In the end, it’s about finding a balance for the child so that he enjoys life, being a child and being mischievous,” says Alexander, 37, a Belgian dentist who has a practice in the Dutch port city of Rotterdam.
“His grandfather and his grandmother, who raised him, told us already: he is very intelligent, more than the others… Then, when he was old enough to go to school, they kept doing tests on him from higher levels,” adds Lydia, 29, who is Dutch and works as a dental assistant for her husband.
They are now selling the Rotterdam surgery so they can “completely dedicate” themselves to Laurent, who must be taken to university every day because he is too young to go by himself.
“He can’t take the train himself,” says Alexander, whose Amsterdam home features a huge black and white artwork of the faces of himself and his son.
His parents admit they “don’t understand at all” the subjects that come so easily to Laurent, whose closest companions apart from his dog are his laptop and a book on integrated circuits.
Laurent says his goal now after receiving his degree in December is to “make artificial organs to prolong life”.
The reason? He wants to help heart patients — like his grand-parents.
“I still have to see how I’ll do it. I’ve only just started.”
His parents are now already in contact with universities in the United States as they eye another degree for their son.
Aware of the media attention that has recently surrounded his son, Alexander says his son is growing up in a healthy environment unlike “singers and pop stars.”
“If, one day, we realise he’s becoming big-headed, that he’s becoming pretentious or arrogant, we’ll put his feet back on the ground.”
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