The release of Will Smith’s upcoming movie, “Concussion,” has been clouded by claims from the scientific community that Smith’s character, the real-life Bennet Omalu, has exaggerated his contributions to the study of a brain disorder affecting professional football players…
But in this case, Hollywood drama isn’t entirely to blame: Omalu has himself suggested that he both discovered CTE and coined its name.
“I said to myself, Bennet, you cannot just publish this as another disease — it will be drowned,” Omalu said in a lecture in 2013. “You need to give it a name, and you need to give it a sexy name. You need to give it a name that has a good acronym that people would remember — even the 3-year-old kid would remember. That was how CTE came about.”
Speaking with the AP, Omalu softened his take, saying, “The pathology of CTE in a football player had not been known before I described this disease.” But he was responsible for making CTE “a proper noun,” he said.
