Beyond the test’s dubious accuracy, there was a flaw in how the study itself was conducted over the years: Terman repeatedly intervened in the lives of his high-IQ subjects, often without their knowledge. He couldn’t help himself. He wrote them recommendations for admission to Stanford, gave small sums of money during tough times, and, in one case, helped a fourteen-year-old be placed in a good foster home rather than returned to his abusive father. (To be clear, Terman didn’t intervene to help any in the control group.) These intrusions by Terman made the study’s conclusions scientifically unreliable, to say the least: readers could rightly question if the geniuses outshone the control group because of their talents or because they had an influential guardian angel. For all its statistical charts and plots of standards of deviation, his work wasn’t science—it was advocacy. His dream was a society led by a hereditary class of super-intelligent beings. A beehive run by a few king bees.