In Brawl For Seau Brain, a Proxy War Over Concussion Science

This is just a sad and deeply unfortunate situation for all involved. I understand needing to move quickly to get permission to extract and process the brain as quickly as possible, but the way this went down gives not only scientists a bad name (and they look awful, no doubt about that...and no need either - as soon as one researcher had access to the tissue, and made sections, there's plenty to share with multiple investigators, it's just dumb), but the NFL as well.

I am most concerned about the NFL's participation in this - they need to be hands-off and let independent researchers verify the findings, then work to make the game safer for the payers if that's the cause of the problem Seau had. What should have happened was an understanding up front with Seau of how he wished his body to be donated, or not, before he died so there was no confusion, maybe this will be a lesson for more athletes.

In Brawl For Seau Brain, a Proxy War Over Concussion Science
April 29, 2013, 11:15 am ET by Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada

Omalu, 44, was the first researcher to identify brain damage in a former NFL player. When he published his results, in July 2005, the NFL attacked him and insisted he was wrong. His research has since been vindicated many times over, with each new discovery of the crippling neurodegenerative disease in a dead football player.

“I talked to the NFL,” Tyler Seau, then 22, told the chaplain. The league, he said, informed him that Omalu’s “research is bad and his ethics are bad.” Tyler was in a rage. Omalu “is not to be in the same f—ing room as my dad!” he screamed. “He’s not to f—ing touch my dad! He’s not to have anything to do with my dad!”

Omalu left and returned home, his brain briefcase empty.

From that point on, the NFL played a powerful role in determining what happened to Junior Seau’s brain — who studied it and where. In the hours, days and weeks after Seau shot himself in the chest with a .357 Magnum revolver — the shocking end to the life of one of the most admired players in history — the league muscled aside independent researchers, ignored a previous commitment to Boston University and directed Seau’s brain to the National Institutes of Health — four months before the NFL donated $30 million to that institution for concussion and other research.

The NFL’s intervention in the fate of Seau’s brain — the most prized specimen yet in the race to document the relationship between football and brain damage — was part of an aggressive strategy to dictate who leads the science of concussions. By shunting aside Omalu, whose discovery sparked the concussion crisis; Boston University researchers, the leading experts on football and brain damage; a Nobel laureate; and other suitors, the league directed Seau’s brain away from scientists who have driven the national debate about the risks of playing football — the central issue to the NFL’s future.