When Science Goes Wrong (2 page)

There were also people who played key roles in the events described in this book but who declined to speak with me, or who did not respond to repeated requests for an interview. I have attempted to describe their actions and represent their viewpoints as accurately and fairly as possible by reference to their published writings or statements, news reports, or information provided by other interviewees. Any failure to do them justice represents a shortcoming in this book that I regret.

I am grateful to Christian Wehrhahn, Ulrike Seibt, Kerry Sieh, and my brother, Benedict le Vay (author of the
Eccentric Britain
series and
Britain from the Rails
), for reading and commenting on portions of the book. Ben also helped develop the book’s concept, and my agent Andrew Lownie helped turn that concept into a proposal for a saleable manuscript. So all I had to do was write it.

NEUROSCIENCE: The Runner’s Brain

MORGUES ARE SPOOKY PLACES at the best of times. Even during the day, when knots of chattering medical students gather round the brightly-lit dissecting tables and senior pathologists poke at ruptured aortas or cancer-ravaged livers, they offer uncomfortable reminders of our own mortality. Not just the sight of the dead and the disorders that killed them, but also the odour – if not the odour of death itself, then the acrid fumes of formalin, the preservative that keeps death’s putrefaction at bay.

At night, it’s worse. And it was night – the middle of the night – as Rebecca Folkerth stood next to a table in the morgue at the New England Medical Center, Tufts University’s teaching hospital on Tremont Street in downtown Boston. It was on a weekend in the late winter of 1991. Bundled against the cold, a few late-night revellers were still strolling the streets outside, looking for all-night Chinese restaurants or checking out the attractions of the Combat Zone, Boston’s always-open red-light district. But inside the morgue, all was quiet, and Folkerth was alone.

Well, not quite alone. For company she had 53-year-old Max Truex, whose brain she was removing.

Folkerth was a pathologist, but not a senior one. In fact, the blonde 32-year-old had just taken her boards – the examination that qualified her in the sub-speciality of neuropathology – a few months earlier. She hadn’t yet accumulated the portfolio of macabre experiences that make pathologists such entertaining dinner guests, but this night would get her off to a good start. As she looked at Truex’s brain, she blinked, looked again, and said to herself, ‘What the
hell
is this? This is
creepy
!’

Max Truex was born in Warsaw, Indiana, in 1935. His father, Russell, was a locomotive engineer with the Pennsylvania Railroad. Although he drank too much, Russell was a good family man and a reliable provider for his wife, Lucile, and their three sons, Gene, Max, and Don.

Gene was four years older than Max, so there was always a certain distance, an unquestioned division of authority and obedience, between them. With Don it was different. Don was born only a year-and-a-half after Max. What was worse, Max grew slowly, so already by the time he was six Don had caught up with him in stature. When I visited Don in 2005 – he’s now in his late sixties, a practising dentist in Santa Barbara, California, and a running, cycling, and general fitness enthusiast – he told me that the height issue was a major factor in their relationship. ‘It was a real sore point for him,’ he said. ‘When we were youngsters, it was a fight every day. Our next-door neighbour said she thought we would never grow up, because one of us was going to kill the other.’

But it wasn’t either Max or Don who failed to grow up – it was their older brother, Gene. When he was 16, and the younger boys were 12 and 11, the three of them were driving in the family car, with Gene at the wheel. At an intersection they collided with a dump truck, and Gene was killed.

After this tragedy, Max found himself suddenly and unexpectedly in the role of eldest son, yet with a younger brother who was now several inches taller than he was. What saved the two boys from mutual destruction was sports. Gene, before his death, had already been running the mile in high school, and now the two younger boys followed his lead, taking to running and other sports with fierce dedication and competitiveness. And in the process they became good friends.

Although there are exceptions, taller runners usually excel at sprinting, while smaller runners do better in endurance events. At a final height of 5ft 5in, and a weight of 9st 3lb, Max Truex was very similar in stature to Ethiopians like Haile Gebrselassie, who utterly dominated world competition at 10,000 metres during the 1990s, or Kenenisa Bekele, the current world record-holder at that distance. But back in 1950, no one had set eyes on an Ethiopian runner, so Max’s modest size drew people’s attention. It encouraged them to develop an affectionate or protective attitude toward him, as if they saw him as a permanent child.

There were other traits that had the same effect. Although the Truexes are French in ancestry, Max had a broad, Slavic-looking face that seemed to carry a fixed, somewhat childish smile, even when he was running. And as he ran, he ‘skipped’ – he would frequently and erratically switch his stride, as if out of sheer playfulness. Indeed, he was naturally good-humoured. For all these reasons, people called him Maxie and liked to take him under their wing. Later, when newspapers started recording his feats, they would refer to him with patronising titles like ‘The Little Strider.’ They described him as ‘spunky’, as if his small stature was a natural handicap that only grit and determination had overcome.

In high school, Max Truex was a star athlete – he won the state cross-country championship and set a national interscholastic record for the mile. On account of his performances Truex was actively recruited by several universities, and he finally accepted a track scholarship at the University of Southern California, where he was drawn by the warm climate and the school’s high ranking in athletics.

One of the people who was involved in recruiting him was USC’s assistant track coach, Jim Slosson, who became a lifelong advisor and friend to Truex. Under Slosson’s tutelage, Truex quickly came to focus on the long-distance events – the 5,000 and 10,000 metres – where his remarkable powers of endurance counted the most.

Success came quickly. In June of 1956, at the age of 20, Truex won the 10,000 metres at the US Olympic trials, thus guaranteeing him a berth on the Olympic team. In October of that year, one month before the Games, he set his first US national record, in the 5,000 metres. (He was to set four more records in that event over the following six years.) Unfortunately, he suffered a muscle injury shortly before leaving for the Olympics, which were held in Melbourne, Australia; he competed in the 10K but did not do well.

At USC, Truex was a member of the Air Force Reserve Officers Training Corps, so in 1958, after graduating, he joined the Air Force and served for four years as an officer at Oxnard Air Force Base in California. This base was a hotbed of athletic activity – the athletes were given all the time they needed to train and compete. In 1959, Truex set a new US indoor record in the two-mile event. Then, in the following year, he was the highest-placed American in the 10,000 metres race at the US Olympic trials, again guaranteeing himself a place on the Olympic team.

The 10K race at the Rome Olympics, in September of 1960, was probably the high point of Truex’s running career. He didn’t win – in fact, he only finished sixth – but his time of 28 minutes and 50.34 seconds took eight seconds off the existing US record and was a performance which put the United States on the distance-running map for the first time. Just a week after the Rome Olympics, Truex iced the cake by setting a new US record in the 3,000 metres.

Truex quit competitive athletics in 1962, when he left the Air Force and entered law school at USC. He didn’t quit running, however. He ran all through his three years at law school, and he ran while he was working as an attorney, first in private practice in Orange County and then in the legal office of the County of Los Angeles. He lived in an apartment near Universal Studios: during that period he ran five, six, or seven miles daily along a footpath next to the Hollywood Freeway. He didn’t need the spur of competition, he just loved running and the sense of fitness that went with it.

‘I told him I thought it was unhealthy to run along the freeway,’ Jim Slosson told me in a 2005 interview, and indeed it must have been. Los Angeles at that time had some of the worst air pollution in the country. Truex was breathing in a truly evil brew of toxins, including carbon monoxide, particulates, ozone, and lead from automobiles on the freeway, as well as industrial chemicals such as the pesticide DDT, which was being manufactured with carefree abandon by the Montrose Chemical Corporation at its plant on Normandie Avenue. Although now banned, residues of the wind-born DDT dust can still be found in soils miles from the plant.

Even during Truex’s competitive career, there were several occasions when his running had caused him acute health problems. He had to drop out of at least three races on account of exhaustion caused by some combination of excessive heat and air pollution. The worst occasion was in 1961, while he was competing in the Corrida de São Silvestre, a traditional 15-kilometre race that is held every New Year’s Eve in São Paulo, Brazil. Although the race took place at night, it was oppressively hot and humid. Truex was in the lead, immediately behind a phalanx of motorcycles and television trucks that belched the combustion products of cheap South American gasoline. He suddenly collapsed, and the next thing he knew he was in the hospital, hooked up to an IV but losing fluids faster than they could be pumped in. By the time he got on a plane back to the United States, he was fifteen pounds lighter than when he set out.

In spite of his chronic exposure to pollutants and heat stress, Truex remained in apparent good health during his early professional years. He enjoyed his work as an attorney, often appearing in court to argue real-estate and land-use cases on behalf of the county. And in 1973 he married.

I recently met Truex’s widow, Kay Truex De Justo, in Fresno, California, where she lives with her present husband, Michael De Justo. She is in her late 50s, a trim-looking, well-preserved brunette with a precise, no-nonsense style of speech that may reflect her educational experience – she was in graduate school in English at both USC and Massachusetts’ Brandeis University, although circumstances prevented her from obtaining a doctorate at either institution.

Kay told me that at the time she met Max in the summer of 1973, she was working as a teacher in Fresno, California, the city where she was born, but sometimes came down to Los Angeles to visit one of her brothers. On these visits she occasionally dated a colleague of Max’s, but it didn’t work out, and that colleague – whether out of kindness or in order to speed the end of the relationship – set up a blind date for her and Max. Although Max was 11 years older than she – he was 37, and she was 26 – the two hit it off right away. Within a few weeks, they went on a backpacking trip together in the eastern Sierras, and within four months they had married.

Kay loved Max’s outgoing, light-hearted approach to life and his active lifestyle. Besides backpacking, he introduced her to skiing, which took them to Heavenly Valley at Lake Tahoe, among other locations. Max also continued to run; soon after they married they bought a house in the Hollywood Hills, so Max was able to run in Griffith Park, a slightly healthier environment than the Hollywood Freeway.

Children were quick in coming: Gene, their eldest son (no doubt named for Max’s older brother) was conceived on their honeymoon and born in August of 1974, and their second son, John, was born two years later. A few months before John was born they moved to a new home in Manhattan Beach.

One evening in early 1979 when Kay was preparing dinner, she looked through the kitchen window and saw Max walking in from the garage as usual – but he was dragging one of his feet as he walked. Kay didn’t think much of it; she knew that Max had injured that foot sometime during his running career. But it kept on happening, and after a few weeks it became his regular style of walking. Then she noticed something else: when she kissed Max goodbye in the morning, she saw that he had failed to shave a small part of his face, up by one ear. Max himself noticed problems. He had trouble raising his arms to wash his hair in the shower, and he also had voice problems. On one occasion when he was on his lunch break, he saw an old friend across the street and tried to shout his name but no sound came out of his throat. These symptoms alarmed him, but he said nothing to Kay about them at the time and he minimised the significance of the symptoms that she herself had noticed.

A few months later, one of Max’s hands began to shake – a steady tremor that showed itself most when his arm was at rest. One of Max’s legal colleagues noticed the tremor and recommended that Max go see a doctor. He did so, and as a result Max was admitted to Encino Hospital. ‘They ran all manner of tests on him,’ said Kay, ‘and on Thursday of that week they told us that it was Parkinson’s disease.’

At the time he was diagnosed, Max didn’t know much about Parkinson’s disease, but Kay was well aware that it was a progressive and potentially fatal disorder of movement. ‘There had been a man in our church who had had it,’ she said. ‘You could just see him diminish. I knew it was very serious.’