What you won’t read in the November Esquire is that my friend Luke spent six years reporting this story. He began when we were both working together at Atlanta magazine, when it was just an idea that we talked about for hours; an idea that transformed into actual reporting, with some big and fascinating roadblocks along the way. I knew that if he ever wrote it, it would turn out to be a great story; that it had to be; that by the very nature of the subject matter, and since he was a great writer, it would end up being even more. When he told me a couple months ago that he had actually sat down to write it, I thought about the years in between then and now, our friendship, the stories that we wanted to do, and how good we wanted them to be.
Luke Dittrich: The laboratory at night, the lights down low. An iMac streams a Pat Metheny version of an Ennio Morricone tune while Dr. Jacopo Annese, sitting in front of his ventilated biosafety cabinet, a small paintbrush in his hand, teases apart a crumpled slice of brain. The slice floats in saline solution in a shallow black plastic tray, and at first it looks exactly like a piece of ginger at a good sushi restaurant, one where they don’t dye the ginger but leave it pale. Then Annese’s brush, with its practiced dabs and tugs, gently unfurls it. The slice becomes a curlicued silhouette, recognizable for what it is, what organ it comes from, even if you are not, as Annese is, a neuroanatomist.
He loves quiet nights like these, when his lab assistants set him up with everything he needs the numbered twist-off specimen containers, the paintbrushes, the empty glass slides and then leave him alone with his music and his work.
Annese coaxes the slice into position above the glass slide that lies half submerged in the tray, cocking his head, peering at it from different angles, checking to see that he has the orientation right. The left hemisphere must, when you’re looking directly at the slide, be on the right side of your field of view, just as it would be were you staring into the eyes of the brain’s owner. Although brains are roughly symmetrical, they are not entirely so, and Annese has become familiar with the individual topography of this one, all its subtly asymmetric sulci.
For additional reference, Annese occasionally glances at a digital photograph on the screen of the computer. The photograph, two months old, was taken during another late night at the lab. It shows a bladed machine, a cryomicrotome, similar to a meat slicer in a deli. The machine holds a block of frozen gelatin and the block of frozen gelatin holds a brain. Annese had sheared the whole brain into 2,401 seventy-micron-thin slices, the camera snapping once before each pass of the blade, and this particular image captures the moment before he sheared off the slice that now floats before him. The picture provides a useful comparison for Annese now, showing the slice as it looked in situ.
That night of slicing had not been as solitary as this one. Not only had all his lab assistants been here, but thousands of other people had been present in another sense, since Annese had streamed the event live online. A colleague of Annese’s later confessed that he had watched the Web stream with anxiety, hoping that Annese wouldn’t become famous as the second doctor to screw up this particular brain.
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