Granted this was many years back now, but when I was familiar with the Westinghouse Award world there was invariably an adult scientist somewhere in the backgro

Granted this was many years back now, but when I was familiar with the Westinghouse Award world there was invariably an adult scientist somewhere in the background pushing a research agenda. Go to any R1 university and talk to the postdocs, they are the same teenagers with ten to fifteen more years of knowledge under their belts. That's not to say there is no such thing as prodigy, but they tend to be in a few fields where it is possible to substitute sheer raw brilliance for knowledge of the literature (e.g. certain subfields of math) and they are extremely rare.