Brain

  Scene One: January 1990: Troy Carter, 17, was so obsessed with music and the record business that he dropped out of West Philadelphia High School. Every day he walked to Delaware Avenue, to the studio of hip-hop icons DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince. He went with his rap group, 2 Too Many, a name they chose because there were three of them, but always only bus fare for one, or food money for one, or whatever they needed or wanted, only enough for one. They hoped to find a way inside, a chance to perform.

DOMENIC GRECO refused to let a crippling neurological disease that was eating away at his body and wracking him with terrible pain stop him from working. By the end, he was able to communicate only by blinking his eyes, the only movement that Lou Gehrig's disease had left him. When he lost his eyesight, he knew it was time to call it quits. He died Thursday at age 60. He lived in Fort Washington. The reason Domenic fought so hard was that he had work to do. His professional life had been devoted to helping people with such conditions as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)

Philadelphia researchers have detected part of the virus that causes cervical cancer in a surprising place: a congenital brain malformation that causes an intractable form of epilepsy in children. This is the first study to uncover evidence of the microbe - human papillomavirus (HPV) - in the brain. It is also the first to suggest that an infection in the fetal brain leads to the malformation, which has no known genetic or environmental cause. Peter Crino, a neurologist in the Shriners Hospitals Pediatric Research Center at Temple University, conducted the study with colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania.

JERUSALEM - Seven years after a massive stroke removed him from office and left him in a vegetative state, former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is able to process information and has exhibited "robust activity" in his brain, according to doctors who conducted recent tests. Though some hoped Sharon might regain consciousness and resume his life, experts warned that was highly unlikely. The medical team that tested him last week said Monday that the scans showed Sharon, 84, responding to pictures of his family and recordings of his son's voice.

AS WE WATCH this year's NFL playoffs unfold, we wonder who among the star players will win a Super Bowl, who will enter the Hall of Fame . . . and who among them will commit suicide before age 50. A grisly question, but a fair one. Last week, the National Institutes of Health revealed that one of the NFL's all-time greats, Hall of Fame linebacker Junior Seau, suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy - CTE - the degenerative, sometimes-fatal brain...

Junior Seau, one of the NFL's best and fiercest players for two decades, suffered from a degenerative brain disease often associated with repeated blows to the head when he committed suicide last May, the National Institutes of Health said in a study released Thursday. The NIH, based in Bethesda, Md., said Seau's brain revealed abnormalities consistent with chronic traumatic encephalopathy or CTE. It said that the study included unidentified brains, one of which was Seau's, and that the findings on Seau were similar to autopsies of people "with exposure to repetitive head injuries.

Every year, 1.7 million Americans suffer traumatic brain injuries, the result of car accidents, sports, gunshots, and mishaps as seemingly minor as a slip and fall. The rehabilitative path on which many embark was paved in part by Dr. Irwin W. Pollack. A professor of psychiatry and neurology at New Jersey's Robert Wood Johnson Medical School from 1968 to 1998, Dr. Pollack was among the pioneers of an integrated therapy now standard in the field. Where disabilities once were treated piecemeal, he marshaled myriad specialties in a team effort to give head-injury patients if not their old lives back, then new lives.

DR. IRWIN W. POLLACK gave hope when there seemed to be no hope. A heartbroken parent would come to him and say, "This is my son, but he isn't anybody I know. " A wife would say, "This is my husband, but he's a different person. " These were victims of devastating brain injuries, struck down in accidents, muggings and other trauma. Their injuries often rendered them unable to function. They sat in dark rooms, lost in the underworld of cognitive emptiness. But to Dr. Pollack there was always hope.

JUNIOR SEAU, one of the NFL's best and fiercest players for 2 decades, suffered from a degenerative brain disease often associated with repeated blows to the head when he committed suicide last May, the National Institutes of Health said in a study released Thursday. The NIH, based in Bethesda, Md., said Seau's brain revealed abnormalities consistent with chronic traumatic encephalopathy or CTE. It said that the study included unidentified brains, one of which was Seau's, and that the findings on Seau were similar to autopsies of people "with exposure to repetitive head injuries.