the procedure. Three years after Truex’s death, one of Freed’s patients suffered a brain haemorrhage during the transplant operation; he died a few weeks later.)
The rejection of the manuscript caused another delay, but in 1995 Folkerth and Durso sent the manuscript to another, less prestigious journal, Neurology . It was accepted, and it appeared in 1996, five years after the autopsy it described. Folkerth and Durso didn’t name Iacono in the body of their article. ‘I didn’t want to indict the guy, I didn’t want to be too accusatory,’ Folkerth says. Still, they did thank both Iacono and Kay Truex in a footnote, so anyone in the field would have realised which case they were talking about.
Iacono didn’t respond to the Neurology article, or if he did his response didn’t get published. But the journal did publish a response from a research team that had begun to do foetal-cell transplants at the University of South Florida in 1993. Evidently, this team, like Curt Freed, was worried that Folkerth’s article would throw the field of foetal-cell transplantation into disrepute, and they expressed their feelings about what Iacono had done in unusually strong language. ‘This is a case of extremely poor tissue dissection,’ they wrote. ‘One wonders why this transplant was performed in China,’ they added, ‘outside of State and Federal regulations, Institutional Review Board oversight, and peer review scrutiny.’ ‘We should not be surprised,’ they concluded, ‘that poor science leads to poor outcomes.’
Iacono never abandoned his conviction that Truex was greatly helped by his transplants, and he rejected the idea that the tissue in his ventricular system caused his death. ‘There weren’t any signs of increased intracerebral pressure,’ he told me. ‘He wasn’t having urinary incontinence, he wasn’t showing signs of dementia, he wasn’t complaining of headaches. He was acting normally, and his wife said he came in and sat down and died. That just doesn’t sound like [ventricular blockage]. His death was officially signed out as a heart attack.’ (Kay says that Max’s death certificate lists only ‘Parkinson’s disease’ and does not mention any immediate cause for his death.)
A few months after Truex’s death, a memorial service for him was held at USC; it was attended not only by family members but also by many of Truex’s old team-mates from his college and Air Force days. Jim Slosson was there too. As a more lasting memorial, his family and friends endowed a college scholarship for athletes from Warsaw High School. There is also a Max Truex Memorial interscholastic track meet that is held in Indiana every May.
Max’s mother, Lucile, died exactly nine months after Max, on Christmas Eve of 1991. She had been in frail health, but the shock of her son’s death accelerated her own, Kay believes. Kay stayed on in Boston for a year so that Gene could graduate from high school, and then she and the younger children moved back to Fresno, the city of her birth. In 1993 she attended her 30th high school reunion, and there she ran into Michael De Justo, a classmate she had been out of touch with for decades. Within a few months they married.
During all the years since Truex’s death, neither Kay nor anyone else in the family learned what Rebecca Folkerth found in his brain – not even after her findings were published. Kay tells me that she did have a phone conversation with Folkerth some time after her husband’s death, but all she learned from that was that he had not suffered a stroke. As to whatever else Folkerth said during the conversation, Kay said, ‘I could not for the life of me understand what she was saying to me.’ Thus it is possible that Folkerth did describe what she found, but did so in technical language that failed to communicate much to a layperson like Kay.
It wasn’t until the summer of 2005, when I met Kay in Fresno, that she learned about what had
The rejection of the manuscript caused another delay, but in 1995 Folkerth and Durso sent the manuscript to another, less prestigious journal, Neurology . It was accepted, and it appeared in 1996, five years after the autopsy it described. Folkerth and Durso didn’t name Iacono in the body of their article. ‘I didn’t want to indict the guy, I didn’t want to be too accusatory,’ Folkerth says. Still, they did thank both Iacono and Kay Truex in a footnote, so anyone in the field would have realised which case they were talking about.
Iacono didn’t respond to the Neurology article, or if he did his response didn’t get published. But the journal did publish a response from a research team that had begun to do foetal-cell transplants at the University of South Florida in 1993. Evidently, this team, like Curt Freed, was worried that Folkerth’s article would throw the field of foetal-cell transplantation into disrepute, and they expressed their feelings about what Iacono had done in unusually strong language. ‘This is a case of extremely poor tissue dissection,’ they wrote. ‘One wonders why this transplant was performed in China,’ they added, ‘outside of State and Federal regulations, Institutional Review Board oversight, and peer review scrutiny.’ ‘We should not be surprised,’ they concluded, ‘that poor science leads to poor outcomes.’
Iacono never abandoned his conviction that Truex was greatly helped by his transplants, and he rejected the idea that the tissue in his ventricular system caused his death. ‘There weren’t any signs of increased intracerebral pressure,’ he told me. ‘He wasn’t having urinary incontinence, he wasn’t showing signs of dementia, he wasn’t complaining of headaches. He was acting normally, and his wife said he came in and sat down and died. That just doesn’t sound like [ventricular blockage]. His death was officially signed out as a heart attack.’ (Kay says that Max’s death certificate lists only ‘Parkinson’s disease’ and does not mention any immediate cause for his death.)
A few months after Truex’s death, a memorial service for him was held at USC; it was attended not only by family members but also by many of Truex’s old team-mates from his college and Air Force days. Jim Slosson was there too. As a more lasting memorial, his family and friends endowed a college scholarship for athletes from Warsaw High School. There is also a Max Truex Memorial interscholastic track meet that is held in Indiana every May.
Max’s mother, Lucile, died exactly nine months after Max, on Christmas Eve of 1991. She had been in frail health, but the shock of her son’s death accelerated her own, Kay believes. Kay stayed on in Boston for a year so that Gene could graduate from high school, and then she and the younger children moved back to Fresno, the city of her birth. In 1993 she attended her 30th high school reunion, and there she ran into Michael De Justo, a classmate she had been out of touch with for decades. Within a few months they married.
During all the years since Truex’s death, neither Kay nor anyone else in the family learned what Rebecca Folkerth found in his brain – not even after her findings were published. Kay tells me that she did have a phone conversation with Folkerth some time after her husband’s death, but all she learned from that was that he had not suffered a stroke. As to whatever else Folkerth said during the conversation, Kay said, ‘I could not for the life of me understand what she was saying to me.’ Thus it is possible that Folkerth did describe what she found, but did so in technical language that failed to communicate much to a layperson like Kay.
It wasn’t until the summer of 2005, when I met Kay in Fresno, that she learned about what had
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