"Huh?" was my response when the local radio update featured a clip of Jose Baez, the lawyer of former Patriots' tight end and convicted murderer Aaron Hernandez, accusing the medical examiner's office of holding Hernandez' brain hostage and requested that the family's wishes be honored by releasing the brain to Boston University for CTE analysis. Seemingly out of the loop, this is how I learned of Aaron Hernandez' death by suicide a day before. Other than being surprised by the timing of his death--days after exoneration of a double homicide--and lamenting the tragic nature of Hernandez' life and all parties involved in his drama, my response was due to learning that Boston University was in the game, as it were, for CTE research and diagnosis. "Well this is certainly elevating the school's national status," I recall thinking with pride.A week and a half later, after reading Jeanne Marie Laskas's Concussion (2015), I downgraded my assessment of Boston University's connection with CTE research based on its association with one person featured in the book: Christoper Nowinski, a Harvard-educated, former WWE wrestler and co-founder of Boston University's CTE Center. He is characterized as an attention-seeking opportunist and one of a long-list of individuals who attempted to rob Dr. Bennet Omalu of his spotlight in connection to CTE.
Adapted into a feature film starring Will Smith in 2015, Laskas's Concussion is a biography of Dr. Bennet Omalu, a Nigerian-born pathologist who made the discovery of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in football players. CTE is a progressive, degenerative disease found in people with repeated blows to the head. According to the book's Amazon description, this discovery is "one of the most significant medical discoveries of the twenty-first century, a discovery that challenges the existence of America’s favorite sport and puts Omalu in the crosshairs of football’s most powerful corporation: the NFL."
The first part of the biography details Omalu's background and youth in Nigeria. The son of a community leader in Nigeria, Laskas relates Omalu's childhood and journey from Nigeria to his studies and settlement in the United States. Seemingly brilliant from a young age, Omalu had always felt like an outsider to the point of becoming chronically depressed and suicidal. Born during turbulent times in Nigeria--though he was shielded from witnessing or experiencing the devastation afflicting his countrymen--Omalu sought to escape Nigeria's corruption by immigrating to the United States to pursue more education. His deep sense of isolation and depression he did not escape, however, for he finally realized, as he states in the book, "Diseases of the mind are difficult to heal." School, work, and his Christian faith kept him focused and compelled him to persevere. His research and reports related to CTE highlighted that corruption exists everywhere.
It was Omalu's autopsy of retired Pittsburgh Steelers player Mike Webster in 2002 that began his journey to the discovery of what he would later name chronic traumatic encephalopathy, CTE. Using his specialized training as a neuropathologist, Omalu conducted independent analyses into Webster's brain tissue. In 2005, he published his findings in the scientific journal Neurosurgery in an article entitled "Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in a National Football League Player" in which he identified Webster as a "documented case of long-term neurodegenerative changes in a retired professional NFL player consistent with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE)." What Dr. Omalu thought would please the NFL and its doctors incited a near-decade long David v. Goliath-type battle that nearly ruined Omalu's career and highlights the corruption that comes with having power.
While I find fault with the book's title because the book isn't really about concussions but rather about Dr. Omalu, I can excuse the false advertising if the strategy was to increase book sales so that Dr. Omalu could earn the credit he deserves and which others (particularly the NFL) attempted to deprive him of for his discovery of CTE. I did not find Laskas's writing style to be as engrossing as Skloot's in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks; still, Concussion is a worthy text because it details the degree to which those with power (in this case the NFL) attempt to destroy those who challenge their standing, even at the expense of others' health and survival; showcases how institutionalized prejudice and racism can prevent people of color from being heard and credited for their work; and exposes how medical and scientific research can be corrupted by financiers with an agenda.
Crossposted at CBR9
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