Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior feature writer in the NZ Herald ’s Lifestyle Premium team, with a special focus on social issues and the arts. OPINION Why sometimes it’s easier to give than receive. A couple of years ago, I donated my brain to science.
Hopefully it’ll be a while before anyone gets their hands on it, though. The Centre for Brain Research at Auckland University needs a few healthy ones to compare against those affected by the likes of Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, strokes and motor neurone disease. Who knows what state mine will be in when it eventually turns up there? I filled out the forms after doing a story on Auckland neuroscientist Helen Murray’s groundbreaking research into long-term brain injuries from contact sports.
A progressive neurological disease that causes dementia , chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) can only be definitively diagnosed after death by analysing brain tissue. Murray has taken a few head knocks herself, as captain of the New Zealand women’s ice hockey team . Stories like that stay with you sometimes.
In the 90s, I began donating blood after writing about the multitude of potentially life-saving ways blood from the collection of a single 470ml unit could be utilised. (Needless to say, I was extremely piqued when precautions against transmitting mad cow disease were brought in that excluded New Zealanders who’d lived in the UK between 1980 and 1996, although that restriction has just been lifted.
