A former vice-president, Al Gore, and one of the co-founders of Google, Larry Page, were already seated on the stage of Google's "Zeitgeist" conference, an exclusive gathering for the intelligentsia, but the third chair was still empty. After a few minutes, Sergey Brin, the other founder of the world's biggest internet company, joined them. Messrs Gore and Page gave him the floor, because Mr Brin had something important to say.rnThe global "thought leaders" in the audience at Zeitgeist had just spent two days talking about solving the world's biggest problems by applying the Enlightenment values of reason and science that Google espouses. But Mr Brin, usually a very private man, opened with an uncharacteristically personal story. He talked about his mother, Eugenia, a Jewish-Russian immigrant and a former computer engineer at nasa, and her suffering from Parkinson's disease.
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