Medicine: Boxer's Ban

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Brain scan ends a career

Thomas KÖpcke, 18, was one of West Germany's more promising young boxers. Just last year the sturdily built youth was runner-up in his nation's junior heavyweight competitions. Now KÖpcke's career has been brought to an abrupt halt by an X-ray device known as the CAT scanner.

During one of the routine, twice-yearly physical examinations required for all boxers under West German regulations, a standard electroencephalogram showed an "irregularity" in KÖpcke's brain-wave pattern. Doctors then used the CAT (for "computerized axial tomography") scanner to make cross-section images of the boxer's brain and discovered, in their words, "a fairly common, apparently congenital anomaly between the cerebrum and cerebellum"—a condition that might make him particularly susceptible to injury from blows to the head. Hamburg's amateur boxing association believed it had no other choice; it banned the apparently robust KÖpcke from ever boxing again, thus making him a fighter kayoed by the CAT.