Sacks, Oliver

Sacks, Oliver. Uncle Tungsten Memories of a Chemical Boyhood. New York Alfred A. Knopf, 2001. 

Sacks, Oliver. Awakenings. 1973. Reprint. New York Vintage Books, 1999. Exceptional case history and literary work, describing the outcome of treating encephalitis lethargica patients institutionalized since World War I. 

I acknowledge many scholars of the periodic table from diverse fields, including Peter Atkins, Henry Bent, Bernadette Bensaude, Nathan Brooks, Edwin Constable, John Emsley, Michael Gordin, Ray Hefferlin, William Jensen, Herbert Kaesz, Masanori Kaji, Maurice Kibler, Bruce King, Mike Laing, Laurence Lavelle, Guillermo Restrepo, Dennis Rouvray, Oliver Sacks, Eugen Schwarz, Philip Stewart, Mark Winters and many others. 

Now the great thing about L-dopa is that it does get across the blood-brain barrier. Once in the brain, an enzyme known as dopa decarboxylase converts it to dopamine. The results for patients can be dramatic have a look at stories in Oliver Sacks book... 

But no one who is a chemist at heart can resist the elements, and that includes me. It includes Oliver Sacks too, who as a boy set about collecting the elements as most other boys collected stamps or coins. He wanted to own them all. In the 1940s it was not so hard to add to one s collection Sacks could go to Griffin Tatlock in Finchley, north London, and spend his pocket money on a lump of sodium, which he would then send fizzing over the surface of Highgate Ponds near his home. I envy him the best I could do was to smuggle lumps of sulphur and bottles of mercury out of the school laboratory. 

Somewhat curiously, the task of dwelling on the real chemistry of the elements for example is left to amateurs such as Oliver Sacks whose book Uncle Tungsten has been praised by numerous professional chemists (19)... 

Another such phenomenon recently discussed in a popular book (19) concerns persons who have been blind for many years and whose sight is then restored, the "newly sighted". Oliver Sacks relates the rare yet typical case of Virgil, a man blind since early youth due to heavy cataracts. At the age of fifty, he undergoes the relatively simple and riskfree operation for cataract removal. All are hopeful for wonderful results, yet, as has been noted in the handful of cases with other newly-sighted patients, curious and... 

We can ask what did interest people who went to hear Faraday or his contemporaries, and it was clearly not only ideas but also facts. Lectures at the Royal Institution included much on explosives and weapons - the military-industrial complex of Eisenhower s famous speech went back a hundred years or so. Poisons, like explosions, have also always drawn audiences, who might not have gone to hear August Hofinann talk about molecular structures, even though he had croquet balls and rods as his visual aids. In the mid twentieth century, young Oliver Sacks delighted in chemistry, practical and factual, which helped him focus his life in wartime London (Sacks 2001). He, and people like me a little later, learned chemistry not so very different from that of the late nineteenth century, and often in laboratories of that date definitely hands-on. 

Our studies showed that the bulbocapnine-induced catatonic state in wild Norway rats could be temporarily interrupted by intense auditory stimulation, electric shocking that resulted in fighting among the rats, and by immersion in deep water, which necessitated their swimming to safety. Oliver Sacks showed subsequently that catatonia resulting from encephalitis in human beings could be interrupted by the administration of L-dopa, which increases dopamine production and release. 

So it is with chemistry. There are two ways in to the beauty (and danger) of chemistry— I could call the first the smells, stinks, and colors way, and the second the molecular architecture way. I could also call one Oliver s way, referring to the way Oliver Sacks was attracted to the physicality of macroscopic matter transforming. Which he recoimts masterfully in his Uncle Tungsten, a contender (with Primo Levi s The Periodic Table) for the best introduction to chemistry ever written. And there is Sason s way, the delight in the macroscopic molecule, assembled and taken apart, that pervades every page of this book. I think one needs both, especially in our time. 

In 1969, neurologist Oliver Sacks administered L-dopa (then a new miracle drug) to his institutionalized, lethargic patients suffering from Parkinson s disease symptoms after the mysterious World War 1 encephalitis epidemic. The drug gave most of these patients a spectacular, sudden awakening and allowed them to temporarily experience active life. 

In The Mind s Eye, Oliver Sacks tells the story of John Hull, who went blind in his mid-forties. Sacks describes how Hull lost even his visual thinking over time. Yet Hull s brain compensated for the loss by processing the information from his other senses in new and surprising ways of nonvisual thinking. The calculus of loss and gain is impossible to fully integrate, but Hull s experience shows that the brain is fluid... 

Sacks describes how Hull lost even his visual thinking over time. Oliver Sacks. The Mind s Eye. 2010, Knopf. 

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