Truth Doesn't Have a Side

by Bennet Omalu

  When I got back home, I placed the bucket and the brain in a closet to allow it to fix thoroughly. The onslaught in the press against me intensified. To be honest, I began to wish I had never met Mike Webster. Lying awake at night, I wondered why I had ever ventured into this battle. I wanted to walk away. I wanted to go back to doing my job as a forensic pathologist and neuropathologist and get back to living my life. Outside of this mess, I had a wonderful life. Prema and I were building our dream home. We had a baby on the way. Life could not be better in every way except one. And that one was getting worse every day.

  Several weeks later, I placed the brain of Chris Benoit into the backseat of my Mercedes and drove to Morgantown, West Virginia, where my friend Dr. Julian Bailes invited me to use the autopsy room in his hospital to examine the brain. My heart wasn’t in this examination like it had been in the previous three. But since Julian was nice enough to join me in this effort, I had to go through with it. The two of us got to know each other in the middle of the string of bad press and threatening phone calls. He called my office one morning and said something very few people had said: “Bennet, I believe you.” For a neurosurgeon and former team doctor for the Steelers to say this meant a lot to me. I am deeply grateful to Julian, for at this time in my life, he was yet another angel of God who gave me a voice when I had no voice.

  That is why, even though all of these events were starting to take their toll on me, I followed through with bringing Chris Benoit’s brain to Julian. Together, we examined the brain, snapping pictures and taking samples. We finished around 6:30 in the evening. I carried the brain and the sections we had taken for histological analysis and staining back to my car. When I walked up to it, the left back tire was flat. I called the Mercedes Benz emergency road service. Forty minutes later, the technician arrived to assist me. “Hmmm, that’s weird,” he said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “The puncture is in an odd place. It’s on the side. I don’t see many punctures there,” he said.

  I didn’t think much of it. He put the donut spare on, and I drove back to Pittsburgh. The hour-and-a-half trip took me more than two hours because I had to drive much slower with the small spare. By the time I got home a little after 10:00 p.m., I was frustrated and annoyed and just in a bad sort of mind. Prema was already in bed. She went to bed early most nights because she was pregnant. As soon as I got home, I went straight to bed myself. It had been a long day. I was ready for it to end.

  The next thing I heard was my wife yelling at me to come to the kitchen. Startled, I had no idea what day or time it was. I stumbled out of bed and went to the kitchen. The clock on the microwave read 3:18. “Why did you start the dishwasher?” Prema asked.

  “What?” Her question didn’t make any sense to me.

  “The dishwasher is running. It woke me up. When I opened it, I found it was completely empty. Why did you turn on an empty dishwasher?”

  “Uh, I didn’t,” I replied. I reached over and switched the dishwasher off. Then I stood there for a moment, thinking. First I’d had the weird flat tire. Now I had this weird appliance episode. I spoke out loud, but not to Prema. “Look, Chris, I get it. I get it. I will not quit. I will do the best I can to help, but you folks have to help me and guide me. I promise I will do the best I can, but we have to work together as a team and fight this battle together, okay?”

  Prema and I went back to sleep. We did not experience any other strange occurrences. Even so, a few weeks later, I moved Chris Benoit’s brain—along with the remains of Mike Webster’s brain, Terry Long’s brain, Andre Waters’ brain, and Justin Strzelczyk’s brain—from my coat closet to Dr. Bailes’ laboratory at the West Virginia University Hospital.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I Wish I’d Never Met Mike Webster

  My phone rang one evening. I recognized the number as an attorney friend of mine—an assistant district attorney. We didn’t have any cases on which we were working together at the time, so I wondered why he might be calling. When I answered, he was quite upset with me. “Bennet, I thought you told me you discovered CTE. How could you lie to me?”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked. “How did I lie?”

  “I’m watching television right now, and there is a woman from Boston University on the screen who says she discovered CTE. Why would you tell me you discovered it if she did?”

  I was so shocked that I could hardly speak. “Who is she?” I asked. My friend told me her name. I had never heard of her. Then he told me the names of a couple of other people in the same news report. I recognized their names as people who had at one time partnered with me, Bob Fitzsimmons, and Julian Bailes to do research on the extent of CTE. Bob, Julian, and I had later parted ways with them. “They’re lying,” I told my friend. I briefly explained who these people were and how the break with them had come about.

  After hearing my story, my friend became even angrier, but not at me. He seethed. “Oh my God, Bennet, you know what they are doing, don’t you?” he said.

  “Taking credit for my discovery,” I said.

  “There’s far more to it than that. You may not have grown up in this country, but there is a historical precedent to what they are trying to do to you. They want to replace your black face with that of a blonde-headed white woman with whom they are more comfortable,” he said.

  “How can this happen in America?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” my friend said, “but it does. Things like this happen all the time. If there is money to be made—either through a product or through gaining research grants and then marketing the results—there’s a risk of this sort of theft of intellectual property.”

  As sad and dark as my attorney friend’s assertions may seem, his assertions were confirmed several years later by the book and PBS documentary League of Denial. According to the book and documentary, the blonde white woman who claimed she discovered CTE was actually handpicked by Chris Nowinski and a man named Robert Stern from Boston University to examine the brains of football players after the Chris Benoit case and before the Tom McHale case. After my diagnosis of CTE in Tom McHale, a request was made by a family member for me to share the samples of the brain tissues with researchers at Boston University, and as a true scientist, I did so. But this group at Boston University went public with the results without giving me any recognition or acknowledgment whatsoever. To them I did not exist. Tom McHale was the first case of CTE in a football player announced by this group at Boston University.

  When I hung up the phone, I muttered words I had begun saying a lot: “I wish I had never met Mike Webster. I wish someone else had been on duty the day he came into the autopsy room. I wish I had never fixed his brain and never had slides made and never looked at those slides under a microscope. I wish I had never started down this path that now consumes my life. I wish I had never met Mike Webster.”

  But then I remembered that Mike Webster probably wishes he had never met me. I’m sure he wishes he had picked a different occupation, one in which he did not receive blows to the head over and over again, blows that robbed him and his family of himself. And I am sure Terry Long wishes he had never met me. I am sure he wishes he could reverse time and choose basketball or baseball or building houses or anything other than football as a career. The same is true of Andre Waters, Justin Strzelczyk, Chris Benoit, Tom McHale, and every person on the growing list of those I had tested who died from causes related to CTE. Not one of them wanted to die young. Not one of them wanted their brains to betray them and turn them into a person they did not recognize. I wish I had never met Mike Webster, and the feelings were surely mutual.

  But God had brought us together. Just as Mike had suffered, now I had to go through a different type of suffering—one of humiliation and the loss of everything I had spent a lifetime building. Within six years of meeting Mike, I had lost my job, my dream house, and nearly my place in this country. My friendship with the man who was a second father to me, Cyril Wecht, was seve
rely strained—I feared beyond repair.

  There were days I told myself that if I had not found CTE in the brain of a former NFL player, sooner or later someone else would have. I tried to convince myself that if I had walked away from Mike, someone else would have taken up this cause and incurred the wrath of the NFL, its researchers, and the list of organizations and agencies in whom the NFL had its hooks through the funding of research. This other unknown researcher could have gone through the professional suicide I had to endure, not me. Why did it have to be me?

  But then I remembered the promise I had made to Mike. And I also reminded myself that the reason no one else had discovered CTE is no one else looked for it, in spite of the large number of former players struggling with brain trauma–related symptoms. That’s why God chose me as a servant, as an outsider who did not think like everyone about football and those who play it. God brought me and Mike Webster together. I could not deny this truth, even as I wished He had chosen someone else.

  • • • •

  The woman on television taking credit for discovering CTE was just the latest in a string of humiliations that have continued to this day. They began with the NFL concussion committee’s researchers demanding I retract my first paper. I should have expected their response. The powers that be reacted in the same way to the earliest studies that exposed the truth about dementia pugilistica in boxers, back when boxing sat atop the American sports scene. Doctors employed by the boxing industry systemically and systematically denied that boxing caused brain damage. I read one paper where a doctor with ties to the boxing industry claimed that boxing was no more dangerous than cycling or baseball.

  While such a claim is obviously ridiculous today, people back then took it seriously. They did so because of the conformational intelligence of that day. Millions of boxing fans called it the “sweet science,” which overlooked its brutality. At the time, it was one of America’s favorite sports. When you are member of a group, the group influences your mentality, your presuppositions, and therefore your way of thinking and processing information, without you even being aware of it. You reach the same conclusion as the rest of the group, even when that conclusion is not supported by science. This occurs over and over with physicians connected to the sports industry. They become so intoxicated by the status, fame, and exclusivity of their connection to their sport that they become zombies without even realizing it. As someone who stepped in and observed this from the outside, I have thought this to be an interesting phenomenon.

  The NFL medical researchers who attacked my research had the same conformational intelligence distort their perspectives. I do not know how else to explain how a member of the original NFL Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee, a neurologist with impeccable credentials, could go on national television and repeatedly insist that football causes no long-term risk of brain trauma. They denied my research, and even when they found they could deny it no longer, they denied me and my role in it. In the first conference the NFL convened to explore the long-term risks of brain trauma to players and the risks of CTE, they invited everyone to come and speak except me, even though I discovered the disease. They did not want to do anything to lend any legitimacy to me. To them, I am still today a nonperson they wish would just go away.

  Yes, I expected the NFL to continue their efforts to humiliate me. I did not expect the same treatment from my colleagues who had no ties to the NFL. Before my first paper on CTE appeared in Neurosurgery, I presented it at an international meeting of the American Association of Neuropathologists (AANP). Even before presenting my paper, my experience with the AANP had been less than welcoming. I am not accusing the AANP of anything; I am simply stating my experiences and my perceptions from those experiences. When I went to an AANP meeting as a young neuropathologist, no one even extended the courtesy of talking to me, even when I initiated the conversation by saying hello. At one meeting I was standing by myself waiting for a conference to begin. One of my colleagues walked up to me and said, “Somebody spilled water on the floor over there. We need to get it cleaned up before someone slips and falls.”

  I looked at her with a very confused look. After several moments of awkward silence, I said to her, “I am a doctor here for the same meeting as you.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought you were part of the housekeeping staff.” I’ve always wondered if this woman would have made the same assumption if I were white.

  When I presented the Mike Webster paper, the AANP’s reception was cold. I stood in the display hall next to the scientific poster of Mike, but no one asked me a question or commented on my research. Other doctors around me spoke of me in the third person as they stood right next to me as if I were not even there. Most of those who came by did not say anything with their mouths, but their body language spoke volumes. I felt very alone and very unwelcome, like an alien in an association of which I was a member. Not surprisingly, like an alien, I looked very different from everyone else in this meeting.

  That was my last time to attend an AANP meeting. Nearly a decade and a half has passed since I discovered CTE, a subject that has advanced neuroscience and has brought the work of neuropathologists into the international limelight. It should not surprise you to learn that the AANP has never invited me to give a talk about CTE to share my experiences and perspectives. That is not to say they have not had meetings to discuss CTE. They have had many. Yet they have never once asked the neuropathologist who discovered the disease to speak. Even after the release of the movie Concussion, they have continued down this path. They regularly issue press releases promoting other members of the association as the leading authorities on CTE, but they rarely mention me by name.

  I’ve received the same treatment from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a federal agency set up by the government of the United States of America. This is the agency the nation trusts to lead the way in biomedical and health-related research. Even though the NIH has been very involved in brain trauma and CTE research the past several years, they have never reached out to me or even acknowledged my existence. Over the years, I have applied to them and other affiliated organizations for grants for my research, but I have always been turned down. Why? I do not know. Apparently my reputation at the NIH is not good. A close friend of mine, a fellow African, called me one day very distraught after attending a meeting with an NIH executive. My friend told me that the executive said she did not trust “that African doctor”—that is, me. She did not know me. She had never worked with me. She had never even talked to me, and yet she had already made a decision about my competence. My friend urged me to go public with the story, but instead I entrusted this battle to God. He knows the truth, and His truth will prevail.

  Not surprisingly, it has been revealed that part of the NIH’s funding for CTE research comes from the National Football League. In my opinion, I do not believe officials of the NIH or the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) should serve in any capacity on committees of organizations and corporations like the NFL and pharmaceutical companies. And when they leave the NIH or FDA, they should not be allowed to serve on such committees or work in such corporations until after five years.

  The humiliation from the NIH was not just in the distant past. In 2015, I received a call from a very good friend of mine—a well-established and successful attorney. He said, “Bennet, have you seen the news today?” I said no. He told me the NIH put together a panel of neuropathologists from across the country to identify the neuropathological criteria for the diagnosis of CTE. He said he expected to see my name on the top of the list, but he scanned the list and did not see it. He asked if I had not been invited to the panel. I said no, that I was not even aware that the NIH was putting together a CTE panel. He was very upset and said that we could not stand by and continue to let this happen in the United States, that this was a very big slight to me. He wanted to do something. Again, I remembered that God fights my battles for me. I told him not to worry about it—that I have seen worse
, and it did not bother me. Besides, I did not want to be part of a conformational group of neuropathologists. Where were they when I was discovering CTE? Many, if not all, of the members of that panel were the same members of the AANP who had excluded me. Some of them were the ones who continue to deny that I discovered CTE. I consoled my friend, and he calmed down before we hung up. I teased him, talked about other injustices in America, and hung up on a lighter note.

  After I hung up, I had the same thought I have had so many times about not meeting Mike Webster. I would have been left alone. I could have just led my quiet life of faith and enjoyed the simple things of life. But God had other plans.

  In spite of the treatment I have received from the AANP and the NIH, others have embraced me. Along those lines, I must give great credit to the College of American Pathologists, the American Association of Physician Leadership, and the American Medical Association, all organizations of which I am also a member. They have embraced me and my work, in spite of what others have said about me. I respect them very much, for they have treated me with dignity and respect—dignity given not because I am black or white or green, but because of the science behind my research and the impact of my research. That is the way it should be.