His parents were Russian socialists who fled the Tsarist regime. He lectured at Harvard at age 12 before graduating at 16. Then he was persecuted for being a socialist and anti-WW1 protestor, withdrew from public life, and died prematurely while working menial jobs to fund his independent research.

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops

-Stephen Jay Gould