Oliver Sacks: Why I'm a resident alien

[n2doc]

Updated 13:02 06 October 2010 by David Cohen

Oliver Sacks, the neurologist who brought us Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, tells David Cohen about his "lost years" in California, his subsequent life as an alien and how cancer gave him the opportunity to experiment on himself for his latest book

FOR his 76th birthday, Oliver Sacks received an ounce of osmium, the densest natural element in the periodic table. "I like density, and it's the only really blue metal, it's rather beautiful," he says. The year before he got a "nice rod of rhenium" and the year before that it was a piece of tungsten.

You may have worked out that the gifts were chosen because the place they occupy in the periodic table corresponded to his age. Sacks's office in downtown Manhattan, New York, is littered with samples of elements. "I like to have some of my metals around me all the time," he says. It is an impressive collection, though perhaps a little unexpected for a man who is famous for his amazing collection of case histories in neurology.

Sacks, a physician-turned-author, shot to fame in 1973 with the publication of Awakenings, a book that describes how he treated a group of patients suffering from encephalitis lethargica, otherwise known as sleepy sickness. The story was later turned into a film starring Robin Williams. His next famous book, The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, created a template for his non-fiction books about neurology: collections of case histories that Sacks picked for the intriguing ways in which his patients cope with baffling neurological disorders, together with his own scientific, poetic and philosophical reflections.

more (interesting interview)

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827801.200-oliver-sacks-why-im-a-resident-alien.html

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. It's all fun and games until he gets to 84

Then he should get an ounce of polonium, which is highly radioactive, poisonous, and would be incredibly expensive (whoever gives him this will have to fork out for an ounce of platinum in a couple of years, as it is - $1700 today).