The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories

by Pagan Kennedy

  In 1942, the United States opened up its first interment camp for Americans of Japanese descent in Owens Valley, California. The camp, called Manzanar, sat in the middle of a desert. Photographs show tractors plowing through soil so dry that great puffs of powder hang in the air. The people forced to live there suffered from spoiled food, broken refrigerators, bad sanitation. In her book Farewell to Manzanar, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston remembers that “I was sick continually, with stomach cramps and diarrhea. At first it was from the shots they gave us for typhoid, in very heavy doses and in assembly-line fashion: swab, swab, jab, swab, Move along now, swab, jab, swab.…Later it was the food that made us sick.”

  In 1942, Gordon Sato, then a teenager, and his family were deemed “enemy aliens” and sent to live behind the barbed wire at Manzanar. There, he cultivated a small vegetable garden in the dry, dry dirt. That’s about all he wants to say about Manzanar. When I ask him to tell more, he shakes his head, and leans back in his chair, into silence.

  The boy who dug potatoes in the dust of the California desert would go on to a meteoric career in cell biology. From the 1970s through the early 1980s, Sato worked as a professor at the University of California–San Diego; in 1982, he was named director of a program at the W. Alton Jones Cell Science Center in Lake Placid, New York; he published over 150 articles and was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences. It was in the early 1980s, at U.C–San Diego, that Sato made a key discovery about cancer. With his collaborator, Dr. John Mendelsohn, he found a way to deprive cancer cells of a protein that they use in order to grow. It was this insight that led to the development of the drug Erbitux.

  And then in the late 1980s, he retired from cell biology, and devoted himself to answering the question that he says has haunted him ever since Manzanar: How do you make food grow where there’s no water? Or perhaps the real question is this: How do you give people who are stuck in some of the worst places of the world a way to support themselves? How do you help a people who have been stripped of their dignity get it back again? Sato believes that enabling Eritreans to grow and harvest their own food, making them independent from handouts, is part of the answer.

  In the 1980s, Sato began scouting around for a beleaguered population who lived near a coast and could benefit from an unorthodox agricultural program. He approached Chileans and Chinese groups, but didn’t click with them: “They just saw me as money.”

  Then he called an Eritrean professor in Washington, who expressed interest in his ideas—the professor told Sato to meet him in a room at a nearby university. Eritrea was then at war, and its leaders were deeply suspicious of spies. When Sato arrived at the appointed meeting room, he found it empty. “A phone rang and I picked it up and they told me where to go.” He ended up gaining the trust of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front—one of the guerrilla groups then battling the Ethiopians.

  From there, Sato flew to Sudan, where he waited in a hotel with his fish in the bathtub—at the time, Sato believed that fish farming was the best way to help the poor feed themselves, but later he discarded the idea as too labor-intensive. A group of Eritrean fighters transported Sato and his fish across the border; a driver had to listen to a shortwave radio every hour or so in order to dodge enemy troops. Two days after Sato left the hotel in Sudan, it blew up.

  “But why Eritrea?” I ask yet again. “Why risk your life, when there were so many other places you could have gone?”

  Sato shrugs. “I liked the Eritrean people. And I didn’t feel it was dangerous at the time.”

  Whatever the reasons, Sato has found a place that resonates with his own memories, a land of drought and displaced people, of blank sand that hides a terrible past. The village, Hargigo, that is now the center of the Manzanar Project, was once known as a stronghold of resistance against the Ethiopians, the hometown of freedom fighters. In the 1970s, Ethiopian troops tore through Hargigo and killed or chased out everyone. The place turned into a ghost town. Slowly the survivors and others crept back to resettle the place. Now about 3,000 people subsist here, around a murky watering hole that sometimes turns dry. In this living village, Sato plans to create a massive memorial to the lost town of Hargigo. He wants to plant about 2,000 mangrove trees, each bearing a metal plaque etched with the name of someone who was killed by the Ethiopians. But he has run into difficulty: the village was so ravaged that in many cases even the names of the dead have been lost. This is one of the places on earth so brutal that people do not just get massacred, but also erased.

  In the middle of this wasteland, Sato is attempting to build an anti-Manzanar, a place that is exactly the opposite of an internment camp.

  “Manzanar might not have been quite as bad as Auschwitz, but it was bad,” he says. “I am trying to make Manzanar into something good.”

  UPDATE:

  After this article appeared in The Boston Globe Magazine, Sato won a $500,000 Blue Planet Prize. His workers have now planted over one million trees.

  One Room, Three-Thousand Brains

  When I peer down into one of the buckets in a sink, I see my first human brain. It’s actually half a brain, trailing some stem, and the noodle-like folds are pearly in color rather than the gray you’d expect. “We don’t want the smell to be too strong,” says George Tejada, explaining the need to soak the half-brain in water. It has been preserved in formaldehyde, which gives off a powerful stench.

  We’re standing in the dissection room of the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center, a.k.a. the Brain Bank, which is housed on the McLean Hospital campus. A few minutes ago, Tejada walked toward me, peeling off a latex glove so we could shake hands. “Don’t worry, my hands are clean,” he assured me. I did not doubt him. Tejada, the assistant director of tissue processing at the Brain Bank, could pass for the headmaster of a prep school, with his crisp button-down shirt and pressed khakis. The dissection room itself, where human brains arrive and get sliced up at a rate of about one per day, also appears to be disappointingly spick-and-span. Aside from the buckets in the sink—and the map of the brain regions taped up above the counter—it would be hard to guess what goes on here.

  The institution collects brains from donors and distributes tissue to researchers around the world. The Brain Bank stocks “normal” brains as well as brains donated by people who had schizophrenia, bipolar syndrome, Huntington’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. It is thanks to the Brain Bank—along with other such repositories—that neuroscientists are beginning to zero in on the genes involved in such mental disabilities. That, in turn, could lead to the development of life-saving drugs.

  Thirty years ago, there were no brain banks in the United States—at least not officially. Now, more than a hundred such repositories exist. Over the past few decades, psychology has gone through a monumental transition, away from talk therapy and toward gene therapy. Scientists are sorting, storing and examining human brains as never before in history, looking for clues about why we go mad in tiny slices of tissue. It is a profound shift in the way we think about our own thoughts.

  Dr. Francine Benes, director of the Brain Bank, explains about just how powerful this kind of analysis has proved to be. “We’re on the threshold of finding the markers for schizophrenia,” that is, the genes that contribute to a person’s susceptibility to the disease, she says.

  It all sounds very worthy and hygienic, but I must admit that I had come to the Brain Bank hoping to be grossed out, at least just a little. My ideas about what might go on at a research facility that houses over 3,000 human brains has been inflamed by an episode of the original Star Trek in which day-glo-colored brains ordered slaves to fight battles for their amusement. And then there was an old sci-fi movie called They Saved Hitler’s Brain, in which the Führer’s cut-off head, kept alive inside a glass jar, commands what’s left of the Nazi empire. Something about iced brains captures the imagination—after all, no one would bother to make a movie called They Saved Hitler’s Liver. The brain seems to contain the essence of the self. Yet, un
like so many other dear and familiar body parts—our eyes, our arms, our toes—it exists under wraps. Even as I write that sentence, I’m aware of my own brain dwelling in the loft apartment of my skull, doing who-knows-what up there. It is me, and it is also eerily remote.

  “This is a problem that’s not going to go away soon,” according to Dr. Benes, about the complex feelings people have about their brains, and, therefore, about donating that particular organ to science. “It’s believed by many that the soul of their loved one resides in the brain, or they see the brain as what gives one a special connectedness in the spiritual.” For years, when people donated their bodies to organ banks, brains were not part of the deal. Now, the taboo against collecting brains has begun to relax. The New England Organ Bank and the New England Eye and Tissue Bank, for instance, have begun to include brains in the roster of donations they collect. The brain is on its way to becoming just another body part.

  And that’s a great boon to the Brain Bank, in terms of recruiting donors. But outreach is only one small part of what goes on here—most of the work happens after the donor dies, at which time the cells in his or her brain immediately begin to decay. Within hours of getting a call from the donor’s family, the Brain Bankers must find a pathologist in the appropriate region of the country, arrange for that pathologist to extract the brain and put it in a special container, and fly the brain to McLean by same-day shipping. After that, the brain will be photographed, assigned a number, sliced up, frozen, formaldehyded, entered into a database, and distributed to worthy investigators.

  The brain in the bucket, in fact, turns out to be the only one I come across here that looks remotely brain-like. Every other piece of tissue has been so carefully preserved and processed that you’d be hard-pressed to say what it is. Tejada shows me into a room full of freezers, and opens the door to reveal plastic bags, each of which holds a brain hemisphere cut up into 16 sections. Mist rolls out into the room—the freezer is kept at 80 below. The bags themselves appear to contain flash-frozen shrimp.

  When a brain comes in here, usually half of it gets frozen and the other half ends up in formaldehyde—a system designed to give researchers as many options as possible. In the “Tupperware room,” slices of brain tissue marinate in chemicals; each half-brain is stored in the kind of plastic container you might use to microwave leftover pasta. From the looks of the original labels, which still cling to some of the containers, the Brain Bank opted for an off-brand rather than genuine Tupperware.

  Tejada leads me back to his office and shows me a photo of one the brains—such mug shots are made available to researchers, along with other information, in order to help them select which tissue sample they would like to order. The brain in the photo, freshly cut out of the donor’s head, gleams with blood. Unlike the brains in sci-fi movies, this one does not look up to the task of issuing commands to Nazi followers. It’s just a piece of meat. I’m reminded of what Williams James said: “The brain itself is an excessively vascular organ, a sponge full of blood.” This photo is a powerful argument for using a biological model to understand what goes on in the mind.

  “I was part of the shift” toward seeing mental illness as an organic problem, according to Dr. Benes, who is trim and wears a starched lab coat. We’re sitting in her office, and she’s holding research on her lap—a sheaf of papers covered with numbers that represent the gene profiles of schizophrenic, bipolar, and control-group brains.

  In 1973, Dr. Benes attended a neuroscience meeting at a ski resort in Colorado. Then a cell biologist, she had no particular expertise in mental illness. Nonetheless, she attended a talk on schizophrenia, delivered by Dr. Janice Stevens. “I was standing in the back of the room and it blew me away,” according to Benes. Stevens proposed that schizophrenia was due to a malfunction in the temporal lobes—a radical theory back when psychiatrists were still blaming schizophrenia on mothers, who were presumed to have driven their children mad with Joan Crawford-like behavior. Stevens’ paper helped to erase that stigma. Mental illness became a matter of bad wiring rather than bad mothers. “Schizophrenia could now be visualized in terms of the circuitries in the brain,” according to Benes.

  The revelation changed the direction of Benes’ life. She went back to medical school, and, in 1982, established the Laboratory for Structural Neuroscience at McLean. Early on, “there was me and maybe two other people who were doing postmortem schizophrenia research,” she says. By the late 1980s, however, researchers were routinely examining postmortem brain tissue in order to search for the causes of Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s disease. Using the same methods to investigate mental illness no longer seemed so strange. These days, Benes says, “the stigma is gone and you have the excitement of getting inside the cells,” chasing after the genes that lead to mental dysfunction.

  Most exciting, brain scientists have begun to borrow ideas from the colleagues who study problems that affect other parts of the body, for instance, the lungs. “At this juncture we’re starting to move into alignment with cancer research and hematology research,” she says. “That is going to prove to be the most historic step in this field.” Treating the brain as just another part of the body—vulnerable to high cholesterol, second-hand smoke, and bad genes—may lead to breakthroughs that were not possible back when the brain seemed to be something special and separate.

  “I am a brain banker, asking for a deposit from you,” Dr. Jill Taylor sings to me over the phone from her home in Bloomington, Ind. Out there in the Midwest, she’s sitting with a guitar in her lap and a phone receiver lying on the floor before her, strumming like a cowboy. “Find the key to unlock this thing we call insanity,” she warbles. “Just dial 1-800-BRAIN-BANK for information please.” And then she ends with a whoop worthy of Hank Williams.

  Dr. Taylor, the Brain Bank’s Spokesperson for Psychiatric Disorders, tours the country, exhorting those who suffer from mental illness to donate brains to science. In just about every talk she gives, “there’s this wonderful moment when the audience realizes, ‘Oh my gosh, she wants my brain,’” Taylor says. “The tension in the room gets really thick. Everyone’s looking down like we’re all in the first grade—‘Don’t call on me, don’t call on me.’ So I’ll pull out my guitar and sing the Brain Bank jingle. It lightens everything up. It’s been a wonderful marketing tool.”

  Taylor hooked up with the Brain Bank in 1993, a postdoc working in Dr. Benes’ lab, researching the organic causes of schizophrenia. She was determined to prove they existed. Her brother suffered from schizophrenia.

  “The thinking in the professional community for decades was that it was a character flaw caused in part by the schizophrenogenic mother—they blamed the family,” she says. Taylor fought against that stigma on two fronts: as a Harvard researcher and as a board member of the National Association of the Mentally Ill (NAMI), a group that pioneered the effort to understand mental illness as a wiring problem rather than a failure of the will. “It’s only been ten years really that it has been put out that severe mental illness, schizophrenia in particular, is a biologically based brain disorder,” Taylor says. In the mid-1990s, Taylor worked in the lab from Monday through Friday, and then would often hop on a plane over the weekend to deliver lectures around the country, spreading the word about brain donation. “When I first started we were receiving fewer than five psychiatric brains a year,” she says. Now that figure has jumped to 30.

  Taylor admits that back then she was something of an overachiever. “I had been driven towards excellence by very powerful anger. And that anger was related to growing up with a sibling who was not normal. You’re constantly on guard. You trust him and then he hurts you emotionally,” she said.

  On December 10th, 1996, Taylor—then 37 years old—woke up to find she had a brain disorder of her own. “Inside four hours, I watched my mind deteriorate in its ability to process incoming information,” she says. A golf-ball-sized hemorrhage had formed in the left hemisphere of her brain, between the two centers that
process language. Because the hemorrhage had also knocked out the parts of the brain that create fear, she felt only curiosity as her mental functions shut down. “I learned as much about my brain in those four hours as I had in my whole academic career,” she says. “Eventually my right arm went completely paralyzed and that’s when my brain said, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m having a stroke. I’m having a stroke? I’m a very busy woman. Well, I can’t stop this from happening, so I’ll do this for a week, learn what I can learn from it, and then I’ll get back to work.’”

  In fact, recovery took years. “I was an infant in a woman’s body,” she says, unable to wiggle her toes or roll over in bed. “I couldn’t understand when I heard other people making language at me. I lost my ability to read and write.” It was two years before she could cook and talk on the phone at the same time, and many more before she could hop from rock to rock without planning exactly where to put her feet.

  Last summer, Year Seven of her recovery, Taylor strapped herself into water skis for the first time since her stroke. As a girl, she’d been a slalomer, so comfortable on the water that her skis felt like part of her feet. Now, as the boat pulled away, she found her balance, and began cutting through the glassy water. “All of a sudden there was this moment when my body took its position, and every cell remembered that it was powerful. Off I went. It was pure bliss. I had recovered who I was before that hemorrhage.” No longer a weekend warrior, she enjoys a laid-back life in Indiana. She continues to spread the word about brain donations, and she also makes brains—out of stained glass. Taylor’s creations are suitable for hanging against a big sunny window, where you can watch the world through the yellow and blue and green pieces of glass that represent the nuclei and gyri and language centers.