The price of progress?

The NYT has a review of "Perfect Rigor", Masha Gessen's book about Russian mathematician Gregory Perelman, famous for proving the century-old Poincaré conjecture.

By the time Perelman got to university, his fingernails were so long they had begun to curl. He wanted little more than to continue his work undisturbed — and protected by a Who’s Who of Russian mathematicians, he seems to have gotten his wish. After emerging from graduate school as the Soviet Union crumbled, Perelman taught briefly in the United States in the early 1990s (where he wore the same brown corduroy jacket day after day and survived on a diet of black bread and fermented milk). But soon he returned to St. Petersburg and the seclusion of his mother’s apartment. It was there that he would spend most of a decade working on the Poincaré conjecture.

and

He then resigned from the Steklov Institute in 2005 with a letter that read, “I have been disappointed in mathematics and I want to try something else.”

What kind of life is this? Why did those mathematicians encourage Perelman in this? A pox upon them!

If this is the price of progress, then in my opinion it is too much to pay. We cannot offer up such human sacrifices in the name of the advancement of mathematics.