Medical Prodigy Has Prodigious Plans : Science: A 12-year-old, who is about to graduate from college, hopes to make a breakthrough in fight against Parkinson’s disease. He has learned to take his 200-plus IQ in stride.

The boy genius sat in the folding chair at Griffith Park on Sunday afternoon, waiting to take the stage after the Imitation Elvis finished crooning.

The boy’s feet barely reached the ground and, for all anyone knew at this walkathon to benefit Parkinson’s disease research, he was just another 12-year-old in the crowd. Perhaps a bit overdressed in his blue shirt and tie, but just another boy nonetheless.

Then Masoud Karkehadadi was ushered onstage. The adults towered over this diminutive figure who calmly took the microphone and delivered his speech without benefit of notes.

He talked of discovering his “extra gift,” a mind that surpassed almost all others. He said he started thinking about the mind, trying to make some sense out of what makes it work and what makes it stop.

And then, he said, he had started thinking of an “honorable way to donate” his gift, which, in turn, became a factor in turning his attention to Parkinson’s disease.

Such is not usually the stuff of 12-year-old talk, but this was Masoud Karkehadadi, the remarkable man-child, the soon-to-be June graduate of UC Irvine. This is the talk of someone who thinks he may have found a clue in his lab work into the mystery of Parkinson’s, a deadly degenerative disease of the brain.

Then, too, there is Masoud the boy, the one who likes to play baseball and street hockey and computer games with the neighborhood kids and his younger brother, Ahmad. This is the boy who gave a chemistry demonstration during a visit to an elementary school, then went out with the children to the playground.

“When you are around him a lot, one thing you notice is that he is just a kid,” said his Iranian immigrant father, Mahmoud, an auto broker known around the Cerritos Toyota dealership as Mike K. for obvious reasons.

That may be so, but there are few small boys who can talk, as he does, about implanting a miniature pump in the brain of a rat last year and discovering quite by accident a process that seems to produce dopamine cells, which are lost to Parkinson’s disease as it makes its destructive way.

“We have had some promising results,” he told about 200 walkathoners in his short speech.

To risk the obvious, this is the real Doogie Howser.

Over the years, Masoud and his parents have come to take this genius in stride, to cope with the fact that, with an IQ of 200-plus, he will never have a life that follows the normal path of those less endowed.

Having begun speaking when he was 8 months old, Masoud started listening to and memorizing the top tunes on MTV less than a year later. He began writing simple sentences by the time he was 2 and got his first computer the same year. Almost from the beginning, he could watch a cartoon and recite it back word for word, sound effects included. It took a few viewings, though, for him to get down all the words to Walt Disney’s “Peter Pan.”

When he approached school age, he was turned down for admission by a number of private institutions because he was simply too advanced. Instead, his parents hired home tutors who helped him barrel through high school requirements by the time he was 7. When he took the high school equivalency exam, he scored 100%.

Nevertheless, his father, thinking him too young, made Masoud stay home for two more years, until he was 9, before allowing him to enroll at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut. That college experience was not a pleasant one, punctuated by teasing from other, much older students and their perception that he was bent on rubbing in his intelligence. What he did was try to answer every question.

Jacqueline Holden, Masoud’s governess from the time he began attending college, said her ward was not trying to show off in class.

“He had never been to school before,” she said. “He was just so excited to be there.”

From there came a transfer to Orange Coast College, when the family moved to Laguna Hills in Orange County. Then came UCI, where this semester he is taking a course load that includes psycho-biology, molecular biology, physics, physics lab and a writing class.

For his parents, having a brilliant son has certainly had its strains. At one point they had to struggle through a period of financial difficulties because of a pre-teen college student in the house. The expenses included the governess, who accompanies Masoud to all his classes, her car and an apartment near campus for the two of them.

Young Masoud now is back living at the family home in Laguna Hills, though the governess still accompanies him to class each day. That will change when he goes off to medical school.

As for med school, Masoud has applied to a number of places--the University of California schools plus Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins and others. But he is leaning toward staying put at UCI.

“I feel I’m going to make a huge discovery, so I want to stay here,” he said.

And his father worries about the trials of having a son who may be a doctor of medicine by the time he is, say, 15. But there also is great joy in having such a boy, he said.

“Basically, we thank God,” said Karkehadadi. “We consider him to be God’s blessing.”