Dissecting the brain of a football player

By at 2:48 pm Monday, Jul 25

In this video from The Guardian, researchers slice into the brain of former NFL player Dave Duerson.

Duerson struggled with the mental health effects of football-related brain injury, finally killing himself in February of this year. Before he died, he asked that his brain be donated to an organization known as the "NFL Brain Bank," where researchers the brains of deceased sports stars to study what happens to people when their heads are struck over and over and over again.

The Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy – a research facility so clunkily named that it's unsurprising Duerson used a semi-accurate abbreviation, "the NFL's brain bank" – sits in the pleasantly green and airy grounds of the Bedford VA medical centre in Massachusetts, about an hour's drive outside Boston. It was set up three years ago by concerned former athletes who joined forces with Boston University scientists to grapple with the long-term effects of concussions on sportsmen and women, soldiers and other people subjected to brain injuries.

In this morgue the world's largest bank of athletes' brains is being stored on dry ice. It has grown exponentially in the past couple of years to include 75 brains, mostly of American football players but also of hockey enforcers – the tough guys who do the bare-knuckle fighting – and of former soldiers caught in bomb blasts. A further 400 living athletes have promised to donate their brains upon death, including some of the biggest names in their sports. They include "Irish" Micky Ward, the boxer played by Mark Wahlberg in the film The Fighter, and American footballers Matt Birk (Baltimore Ravens), Lofa Tatupu (Seattle Seahawks) and Sean Morey (Arizona Cardinals).

Video Link

(Via Brian Malow)

Read more 

show full bio

Maggie Koerth-Baker

I do the Twitter, the Google+, and (to a much lesser extent) the Facebook.

Books
• Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us, my book about the future of energy in the United States, will be published April 10th.

Upcoming Appearances
• April 2 at Skeptics in the Pub, Boston, Mass.— 7:00 pm at Tommy Doyle's in Harvard Square. Please RSVP.
•April 4 at MIT: "Shedding Light, Online", a discussion about how blogging and a dynamic audience helped shape my book, Before the Lights Go Out—4:00 pm in Maseeh Hall. Please RSVP.
• April 6 at Carnegie Mellon University: More details to come
• April 9-13 at University of Colorado, Boulder: 64th Annual Conference on World Affairs
• April 10 at Colorado State University, Fort Collins: "Putting the Fun Back in Infrastructure"—3:30 pm in the Rocky Mountain Innosphere.
• April 19 at The Bakken Museum in Minneapolis: Book Launch Party! Come enjoy snacks, a presentation by me, and some fun with the Bakken's Leyden jar.
• April 21 at Science Museum of Minnesota, St. Paul: Earth Day Tweetup event with Will Steger and Sean Otto—events run 10:00 am to 2:00 pm.
• May 2 at University of California, Berkeley: "Putting the Fun Back in Infrastructure"—6:00 pm, location TBA.
• May 3 at the American Institute of Architects, San Francisco Chapter—Lunchtime lecture, time and location TBA.
• May 3 at Barnes and Noble, El Cerrito, Cali.—7:00 pm.
• May 30 in New York City—Panel on local and DIY energy with the New America Foundation
• June 22-25 in Aspen, Colorado: Aspen Environment Forum
• July 5-8 at CONvergence in Minneapolis, Minn.—exact times and dates TBA

Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.