Vintage Sacks (19 page)

Authors: Oliver Sacks

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BOOK: Vintage Sacks

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50
In 1970 Maumenee Hussels and Morton came to Pingelap with a team of geneticists from the University of Hawaii. They came on the MS
Microglory
, bringing sophisticated equipment, including an electroretinogram for measuring the retina's response to flashes of light. The retinas of those with the maskun, they found, showed normal responses from the rods, but no response whatsoever from the conesâbut it was not until 1994 that Donald Miller and David Williams at the University of Rochester described the first direct observation of retinal cones in living subjects. Since then, they have used techniques from astronomy, adaptive optics, to allow routine imaging of the moving eye. This equipment has not yet been used to examine any congenital achromatopes, but it would be interesting to do so, to see whether the absence or defect of cones can be visualized directly.

Intriguingly, as Gustavo Aguirre and his colleagues at Cornell University have been investigating, there is a strain of Alaskan malamute dogs who exhibit severe day-blindness (hemeralopia) by the age of eight to ten weeks; in these dogs the retinal cones degenerate early and disappear. Like human beings with maskun, such dogs show day-blindness and total colorblindness, butâunlike achromatopesâdo not have a profound loss of visual acuity, because canines lack a foveomacular region in the retina and thus do not encounter problems with foveal fixation. Like human maskun, this canine hemeralopia is inherited as an autosomal recessive, and preliminary work seems to pinpoint a specific gene in the disease process. “It will be interesting,” Aguirre notes, “once we identify the gene and the mutation in the dog, to establish whether or not the Pingelap islanders and other human achromatopes have a mutation in the same gene.”

51
There may be as many as thirty thousand of these tiny bioluminescent creatures in a cubic foot of seawater, and many observers have attested to the extraordinary brilliance of seas filled with
Noctiluca
. Charles Frederick Holder, in his 1887
Living Lights: A Popular Account of Phosphorescent Animals and Vegetables
, relates how M. de Tessan described the phosphorescent waves as “appearing like the vivid flashes of lightning,” giving enough illumination to read by:

It lighted up the chamber that I and my companions occupied [de Tessan wrote] . . . though it was situated more than fifty yards distant from the breakers. I even attempted to write by the light, but the flashes were of too short duration.

Holder continues his account of these “living asteroids”:

When a vessel is ploughing through masses of these animals, the effect is extremely brilliant. An American captain states that when his ship traversed a zone of these animals in the Indian Ocean, nearly thirty miles in extent, the light emitted by these myriads of fire-bodies . . . eclipsed the brightest stars; the milky way was but dimly seen; and as far as the eye could reach the water presented the appearance of a vast, gleaming sea of molten metal, of purest white. The sails, masts, and rigging cast weird shadows all about; flames sprang from the bow as the ship surged along, and great waves of living light spread out aheadâa fascinating and appalling sight. . . .

The light of Noctilucae in full vigor is a clear blue; but, if the water is agitated, it becames nearly, if not quite white, producing rich silvery gleams sprinkled with greenish and bluish spangles.

Humboldt also describes this phenomenon, in his
Views of Nature:

In the ocean, gelatinous sea-worms, living and dead, shine like luminous stars, converting by their phosphorescent light the green surface of the ocean into one vast sheet of fire. Indelible is the impression left on my mind by those calm tropical nights in the Pacific, where the constellation of Argo in its zenith, and the setting Southern Cross, pour their mild planetary light through the ethereal azure of the sky, while dolphins mark the foaming waves with their luminous furrows.

VINTAGE BOOKS BY OLIVER SACKS

An Anthropologist on Mars

In these seven paradoxical tales of neurological disorder and creativity, Sacks transports us into the uncanny worlds of his subjects, including an artist who loses his ability to see (or even imagine) color, and a surgeon who performs delicate operations in spite of the compulsive tics and outbursts of his Tourette's syndrome.

Psychology/Literature/0-679-75697-3

Awakenings

In the spring of 1969, Oliver Sacks initiated L-DOPA drug treatment for the post-encephalitic residents of Mount Carmel hospital, many of whom had been “frozen” and catatonic for decades. The drug had an astonishing, explosive, “awakening” effect, but the challenges of awakening to a changed world raised profound questions about medical care and what gives meaning to a life.

Psychology/Literature/0-375-70405-1

The Island of the Colorblind

Part travelogue, part medical mystery story, this is an account in which Sacks's journeys to a tiny Pacific atoll and the island of Guam become explorations of the meaning of islands, the genesis of disease, the wonders of botany, the nature of deep geological time, and the complexities of being human.

Science/Literature/0-375-70073-0

Migraine

Migraine
is Sacks's classic meditation on the nature of health and malady, on the unity of mind and body. Here too is Sacks's discovery of how migraine may show us, through hallucinatory displays, the elemental activity of the cerebral cortexâand, potentially, the self-organizing patterns of Nature itself.

Psychology/Literature/0-375-70406-X

Seeing Voices

In
Seeing Voices
Oliver Sacks turns his attention to the subject of deafness, and the result is a deeply felt portrait of a minority struggling for recognition and respectâa minority with its own rich, sometimes astonishing culture and its own unique visual language, an extraordinary mode of communication that tells us much about the basis of language in hearing people as well.

Psychology/Literature/0-375-70407-8

Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood

Oliver Sacks's memoir of his childhood in London in the 1930s and '40s, this is the story of a brilliant young mind springing to life. By turns elegiac and comic,
Uncle Tungsten
chronicles Sacks's love affair with science and the magnificently odd and sometimes harrowing childhood in which that love affair unfolded.

Science/Memoir/0-375-70404-3

Oliver Sacks

VINTAGE SACKS

Oliver Sacks was born in 1933 in London, England, into a family of physicians and scientists, and earned his medical degree at Oxford. Since 1965, he has lived in New York, where he is a practicing neurologist.

In 1966 Dr. Sacks began working in a chronic care facility where he encountered an extraordinary group of patients, many of whom had spent decades in strange, frozen states, like human statues, unable to initiate movement. He recognized these patients as survivors of the great pandemic of sleeping sickness that had swept the world from 1916 to 1927, and treated them with a then-experimental drug, L-DOPA, which enabled them to come back to life. They became the subjects of his book
Awakenings
, which later inspired a play by Harold Pinter and the Oscar-nominated feature film with Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.

Sacks is the author of two collections of case histories from the far borderlands of neurological experience,
The
Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
and
An Anthropologist on Mars
, in which he describes patients struggling to live with conditions ranging from Tourette's syndrome to autism, Parkinsonism, musical hallucination, phantom limb syndrome, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer's disease. He has investigated the world of deaf people in
Seeing Voices
, and a rare community of colorblind people in
The Island of the
Colorblind.
He has also written about his experiences as a doctor in
Migraine
and as a patient in
A Leg to Stand On
. His most recent books are
Oaxaca Journal
and the autobiographical
Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood.

His work, which has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, regularly appears in
The New Yorker
and
The New York Review
of Books
, as well as various medical journals.
The New York
Times
has referred to Dr. Sacks as “the poet laureate of medicine,” and in 2002 he was awarded the Lewis Thomas Prize by Rockefeller University, which recognizes the scientist as poet. He is an honorary fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Further information is available
at
www.oliversacks.com

BOOKS BY OLIVER SACKS

Migraine
Awakenings
A Leg to Stand On
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf
An Anthropologist on Mars
The Island of the Colorblind
Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood
Oaxaca Journal

A VINTAGE ORIGINAL, JANUARY 2004

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

“Uncle Tungsten” and “Stinks and Bangs” were originally published in
Uncle Tungsten
Â© 2001 by Oliver Sacks (Alfred A. Knopf ). “Rose R.” was originally
published in
Awakenings
copyright Â© 1973, copyright renewed 2001 by Oliver Sacks,
and “Foreword to the 1990 edition” was published in the 1990 edition of
Awakenings
copyright Â© 1990 by Oliver Sacks. “A Deaf World” was originally published in slightly
different form in
Seeing Voices,
copyright Â© 1989 by Oliver Sacks (Vintage Books, 2000).
“A Surgeon's Life” from
An Anthropologist on Mars
copyright Â© 1995 by Oliver Sacks
Â (Alfred A. Knopf ). “The Visions of Hildegard” was originally published in
Migraine
copyright Â© 1971, 1992, copyright renewed 1999 by Oliver Sacks (Vintage Books,
1999). “Pingelap” and extracts from “Island Hopping” were originally published in
slightly different form in
The Island of the Colorblind,
copyright Â© 1996 by
Oliver Sacks (Alfred A. Knopf ).