What Happens To Child Prodigies Once They Grow Up?

To get started; the seven year old surgeon.

He is 21 now and still hasn't cured cancer. He was a child prodigy and claimed he had a cure for cancer at age 8.

A little bit of more info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrit_Jaswal

BS could speak by 10 months old and read and write by age two, impossible.

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Is that going to be done by one person though? I can't think of a recent truly major breakthrough in science that really was developed mainly by a single prodigious individual. The technology required for the modern advanced experiments in physics, for instance, are so expensive and complex that there's no way it could be done by a person by themselves. James Lovelock himself says that the day of the lone scientist are unfortunately long gone.

You make a good point, I mean we had to build a $6.4bn LHC to find one particle. It makes me sad in a way, although Einstein used a very simple method using some zinc metal and a circuit to prove that light acts a particle

It makes me sad to think I wont be able to contribute to the world of science

Not really. Einstein was known mainly for his theories and the predictions he made / hypothetical conditions necessary to establish them, not the actual building and testing of theories themselves.

Yes really, he won the Nobel prize for his theory of the photoelectric effect not on his paper of special relativity

Yes and what he did was explain experimental data already available to him... there's a difference between a theory and testing that theory, it's quite possible to conceive of theories but not have the equipment to test them and still contribute to science in the process.

This is a topic I researched for a long time as a former 'gifted' child myself who was pushed to go to uni at 15 (i dropped out).

This ladies story is great/sad http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2008/dec/20/family-child-prodigy

I am now 19 and finally ready to go back into education again.

but I do recall my surprise at starting school and finding that my older classmates weren't all fluent readers like me.