"My rays"

At NeuroTribes, Steve Silberman has an extraordinary interview with Oliver Sacks (link courtesy of the excellent Dave Lull). I can't wait to read the new book (I've read and heard bits of it already), which includes an account of Sacks' own vision loss as a result of an ocular melanoma - the whole interview is too interesting to excerpt, but here's a teaser from the preamble:

The geeky moment occurs when Sacks is in the hospital, forbidden to leave his room because his opthamologist has embedded a chip of radioactive iodine in his eye in hopes of banishing the tumor. The tiny plaque of I-125 triggers a storm of hallucinations — including starfish, daisies, and purple protoplasm — as well as ravaging pain. In the middle of all this, Sacks muses about asking his long-time editor and friend, Kate Edgar, to fetch his beloved collection of fluorescent minerals so he can conduct an experiment. “Perhaps I could light them up by fixing my radioactive eye, my rays on them,” he writes. “It would be quite a party trick!”