Emily Anthes, The New Yorker: “In 1967, William F. Caveness, a neurologist and veteran of the Korean War, began building a registry of living soldiers who had suffered head trauma in Vietnam. Studies of veterans of the Second World War had suggested that penetrating head injuries could cause seizures, and Caveness, who had documented post-traumatic epilepsy in soldiers injured during the Korean War, was eager to understand more about this connection. “He saw that the Vietnam War was heating up, and he wanted to study some American combat veterans who suffered penetrating brain injuries and survived,” said Jordan Grafman, the director of brain-injury research at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. Caveness, the chief of the Laboratory of Experimental Neurology at the National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke, asked military field surgeons to fill out a form whenever they treated an American soldier with a head injury. The doctors would note the date, time, and geographic location of each injury, and whether the soldier had been wearing a helmet when he was wounded. They would mark the position of the wound on a diagram of a human head, as well as record a heap of clinical information: What was the patient’s pulse, blood pressure, and temperature? Had he lost consciousness, sight, or speech? Could he respond to pain or commands? Were all his reflexes intact? “I’m sure Bill Caveness thought, ‘We aren’t going to get much here because it’s the heat of combat,’ ” Grafman said. But forms came pouring in from the battlefields and military hospitals of Vietnam, describing young men who’d been hit with shells, missile fragments, and other shrapnel. Caveness ultimately received information about approximately two thousand servicemen who’d suffered traumatic brain injuries between 1967 and 1970. Scientists have been learning from these men ever since. The Vietnam Head Injury Study, as it is now known, has allowed researchers to track the long-term consequences of head injuries, identify the factors that influence recovery, and even map the cognitive architecture of the brain. This year alone, Grafman has published papers on the neural basis of social problem-solving, pathological aggression after brain damage, and the relationship between caregiver style and cognitive decline—all based on Caveness’s research. The study has yielded more than one hundred scientific papers so far and is likely to yield many more. “It’s the gift that keeps on giving,” Grafman said.”