The Thicket's Prodigy: The Extraordinary Life of an Improbable Genius

The 3:15 train left Polk County on September 2, 1930, carrying a most extraordinary passenger. Eugene H “Gene” Brock, a genius of the type about whom astounding stories are told, was leaving East Texas - one of the country's most backward impoverished areas.

His destination - Texas Technological College.

What Gene didn't know was one day he would achieve a unique status, one attained by only a most select few - as an internationally acknowledge expert in two of science's newest fields: nuclea...