Building 134
P.O. Box 5000
Upton, NY 11973-5000
phone 631 344-2345
fax 631 344-3368
www.bnl.gov

managed for the U.S. Department of Energy
by Brookhaven Science Associates, a company
founded by Stony Brook University and Battelle

News Release

Number: 03-37
Released: May 14, 2003
Contact: Diane Greenberg, 631 344-2347 or Mona S. Rowe, 631 344-5056

Oliver Sacks to Speak on “Creativity and the Brain” at Brookhaven Lab, June 4

UPTON, NY - Oliver Sacks, world-renowned neurologist, humanist and best-selling author, will give a talk on “Creativity and the Brain” at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory on Wednesday, June 4, at 4 p.m. in Berkner Hall. Sacks will sign his books after the talk. All visitors to the Laboratory age 16 and over must bring a photo ID.

Born in London, Oliver Sacks received his medical degree in 1958 from Oxford University. In the early 1960s, he moved to the U.S., where he performed his internship at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco and completed his residency at the University of California at Los Angeles. Currently, Sacks is clinical professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and consultant neurologist to the Little Sisters of the Poor and Beth Abraham Hospital.

In 1966, Sacks administered the drug L-dopa to patients who had remained in strange, frozen states for decades due to a sleeping sickness epidemic in the 1920s. The patients awoke from their statue-like states, and Sacks wrote about them in a book called Awakenings (1973), which later inspired Harold Pinter’s play, “A Kind of Alaska,” and the 1990 movie, “Awakenings.”

Sacks is the author of seven books, which include the best-seller, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat (1985), and, most recently, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001), an autobiographical work.

Call 631 344-2345 for more information about the lecture. Brookhaven Lab is located on William Floyd Parkway (County Road 46), one-and-a-half miles north of Exit 68 of the Long Island Expressway.
 

The U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory conducts research in the physical, biomedical, and environmental sciences, as well as in energy technologies. Brookhaven also builds and operates major facilities available to university, industrial, and government scientists. The Laboratory is managed by Brookhaven Science Associates, a limited liability company founded by Stony Brook University and Battelle, a nonprofit applied science and technology organization.