Boxer's Ban

Brain scan ends a career

Thomas KOepcke, 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 KOepcke'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 KOepcke'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 KOepcke from ever boxing again, thus making him a fighter kayoed by the CAT.

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