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Oliver Sacks: Why I'm a resident alien

By David Cohen

29 September 2010

New Scientist. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

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Oliver Sacks, the neurologist who brought us Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, tells David Cohen about his “lost years” in California, his subsequent life as an alien and how cancer gave him the opportunity to experiment on himself for his latest book

FOR his 76th birthday, Oliver Sacks received an ounce of osmium, the densest natural element in the periodic table. “I like density, and it’s the only really blue metal, it’s rather beautiful,” he says. The year before he got a “nice rod of rhenium” and…

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