Bennet Omalu Research Paper

Words: 568
Pages: 3

Bennet Omalu was born in September of 1968, during Nigeria’s Civil War, to a civil engineer and a seamstress, the sixth of seven children. He showed much potential in his youth, beginning university in Nigeria at just sixteen, and had dreams of becoming a pilot. Instead he became a doctor and moved to America, where his work on Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy would bring him fame in the medical world and put him at odds with the the National Football League.
Omalu spent numerous years at different institutions training in a variety of fields. In the nineties, after coming to America, he next became interested in neuropathology, or the study of diseases, specifically in the brain. Pathologists use a patient's organs and bodily fluids to determine the existence of various diseases. His interest and training in this field would help him immensely when the day came for him to perform the autopsy of Mike Webster.
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Webster died after a heart attack, but the years leading up to his death were filled with mental health issues and addiction, struggles that alienated his loved ones and made Omalu suspicious. Initial tests revealed nothing out of the normal, a brain that appeared quite healthy despite everything. It was only after deeper analysis that Omalu discovered a large amount of tangled proteins in Mike Webster’s brain; proteins that were literally strangling his