English Audio Request

The Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy – a research facility so clunkily named that it's unsurprising Duerson used a semi-accurate abbreviation, "the NFL's brain bank" – sits in the pleasantly green and airy grounds of the Bedford VA medical centre in Massachusetts, about an hour's drive outside Boston. It was set up three years ago by concerned former athletes who joined forces with Boston University scientists to grapple with the long-term effects of concussions on sportsmen and women, soldiers and other people subjected to brain injuries.
Security is tight as you enter the building through heavily bolted metal doors. We pass rooms lined with shelves of jars carrying human brains pickled in formaldehyde. At the end of a corridor, we arrive at a small room into which several stainless steel refrigerators have been packed, one of which is marked: "Feet first. Head by door."
In this morgue the world's largest bank of athletes' brains is being stored on dry ice. It has grown exponentially in the past couple of years to include 75 brains, mostly of American football players but also of hockey enforcers – the tough guys who do the bare-knuckle fighting – and of former soldiers caught in bomb blasts. A further 400 living athletes have promised to donate their brains upon death, including some of the biggest names in their sports. They include "Irish" Micky Ward, the boxer played by Mark Wahlberg in the film The Fighter, and American footballers Matt Birk (Baltimore Ravens), Lofa Tatupu (Seattle Seahawks) and Sean Morey (Arizona Cardinals).
Neuropathologist Dr Ann McKee, a leading expert on degenerative diseases caused by repetitive blows to the head, looks at the brain of an American football player who recently died Dr Ann McKee, a neuropathologist who jointly heads the lab, retrieves a brain from a plastic container and places it carefully on a workbench. At the request of the family, she will not tell me who the brain belonged to, other than to say "he was a very skilled NFL player, very well known".
If you were a fan of American football, I ask her, would you know the name?
"Right," she replies.