1991 Education Award in Neuroscience

Oliver W. Sacks 

As a physician and a writer, Oliver Sacks is concerned above all with the link between body and mind, and the ways in which the whole person adapts to different neurological conditions.

Oliver Sacks was born in London, England (both of his parents were physicians, trained in neurology), and he obtained his medical degree in Oxford. In the early 1960s, he moved to the United States, where he interned in San Francisco and then did his residency in neurology at UCLA. Since 1965 he has lived in New York, where he is clinical neurologist to the Little Sisters of the Poor and Beth Abraham Hospital.

In 1966 Dr. Sacks went to work in a Bronx charity hospital where he encountered an extraordinary group of patients, many of whom had spent decades in strange, frozen states, unable to initiate movement--like human statues--survivors of the great epidemic of sleepy sickness that had swept the world from 1916-1927. They became the subjects of his book Awakenings (1973), which later inspired a play by Harold Pinter, "A Kind of Alaska," and the Hollywood movie, "Awakenings," starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.

Dr. Sacks is perhaps best known for his best-selling 1985 collection of case histories from the far borderlands of neurological experience, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, and 1989 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work on the neuroanthropology of Tourette's syndrome, a condition marked by involuntary tics and utterances.

His seven books, which also include Migraine, A Leg to Stand On, Seeing Voices, An Anthropologist on Mars, and, most recently, The Island of the Colorblind are international bestsellers, and he has recently been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.