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One on a town for the deaf.
As Town for Deaf Takes Shape, Debate on Isolation Re-emerges
By MONICA DAVEY
SALEM, S.D. - Standing in an empty field along a wind-swept highway, Marvin T. Miller, who is deaf, envisions the town he wants to create here: a place built around American Sign Language, where teachers in the new school will sign, the town council will hold its debates in sign language and restaurant workers will be required to know how to sign orders.
Nearly 100 families - with people who are deaf, hard of hearing or who can hear but just want to communicate in sign language - have already publicly declared their intention to live in Mr. Miller's village, to be called Laurent, after Laurent Clerc, a French educator of the deaf from the 1800's.
Planners, architects and future residents from various states and other countries are gathering at a camp center in South Dakota on Monday and through the week to draw detailed blueprints for the town, which could accommodate at least 2,500 people. Mr. Miller, who has been imagining this for years, intends to break ground by fall.
"Society isn't doing that great a job of, quote-unquote, integrating us," Mr. Miller, 33, said through an interpreter. "My children don't see role models in their lives: mayors, factory managers, postal workers, business owners. So we're setting up a place to show our unique culture, our unique society."
While deaf enclaves, like the one that existed in Martha's Vineyard decades ago, have cropped up throughout the nation, this would be the first town expressly created for people who sign, its developers say. Even the location, in sparsely populated South Dakota, was selected with the intent of rapidly building political strength for the nation's millions of deaf and hard-of-hearing people, a group that has won few elected offices around the country.
But in the complicated political world of deaf culture, Laurent is an increasingly contentious idea. For some, like Mr. Miller; his wife, Jennifer, who is also deaf; and their four deaf children, it seems the simplest of wishes: to live in a place where they are fully engaged in day-to-day life. Others, however, particularly advocates of technologies that help deaf people use spoken language, wonder whether such a town would merely isolate and exclude the deaf more than ever.
"We think there is a greater benefit for people to be part of the whole world," said Todd Houston, executive director of the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Washington. "I understand the desire to be around people like ourselves, and I don't have a problem with that, but I don't think it's very wise. This is a little bit of circling-the-wagons mentality, if you ask me."
Over the past 15 years, he said, it has become easier for the deaf and hard of hearing to grow up using spoken language, because of a steady rise in the use of cochlear implants, more early diagnoses and therapies for deaf children and efforts to place some deaf children in mainstream schools. That fact has set off intense political debate over what it means to be deaf and what mode of communication - signing or talking - the deaf should focus on.
Those who want to live in Laurent, though, say their intent is not exclusivity at all, but the inclusion of diverse people, especially those who do not have the luxury of communicating with speech. "We are not building a town for deaf people," said M. E. Barwacz, Mr. Miller's mother-in-law and his business partner in creating Laurent. "We are building a town for sign language users. And one of the biggest groups we expect to have here is hearing parents with deaf children."
Ms. Barwacz, who intends to live in Laurent, is not deaf. She has two daughters, one deaf and one not, and eight grandchildren, four of them deaf. Nationally, experts report that some 90 percent of deaf children are born to hearing parents, setting up a quandary, in some cases, about what language to use in a single household.
As early as the 1800's, deaf leaders debated the possibility of a "deaf state," said Gerard Buckley, an official at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf in Rochester. But the notion came and went. Elsewhere, because of proximity to schools and businesses tied to the deaf, large concentrations of deaf people have gathered in cities like Rochester; Washington; Olathe, Kan.; Frederick, Md.; and Sioux Falls, S.D.
The difference in Laurent, say some among the 92 families who have reserved spaces in the town from as far as London and Australia, is that every element of it would be designed with them in mind. The homes and businesses, they said, would incorporate glass and open space for easy visibility across wide distances. Fire and police services would be designed with more lights and fewer sirens. High-speed Internet connections would be available all over town, since the Internet and Video Relay Service have become vital modes of communication for deaf people. And any shops, businesses or restaurants would be required to be sign-language friendly.
Here in Salem, a dusty 125-year-old farming town of 1,300 three miles from the proposed site of Laurent, people seem unsure of what to make of the idea. "No one has ever come along and tried to start a town," said Joseph Kolbeck, the local barber.
Along the quiet main drag through town, Mr. Miller and Ms. Barwacz, who are originally from Michigan, recently opened a storefront in the old King Koin Laundromat to create and promote Laurent. They moved to Salem not long ago, choosing the area after surveying nearly the entire country looking at factors like population, climate and cost of land.
Some people here wonder how the proposed town of 2,500 would mesh with McCook County's 6,000 residents and its economy of corn, cows and pigs. Others say they doubt Laurent will ever become reality.
Mr. Miller and Ms. Barwacz have revealed little about the costs and their plans for financing Laurent. They say they are using family money, as well as some from a group of "angel investors," led by a man with a deaf daughter who wishes to remain anonymous. First Dakota National Bank is helping to secure financing, and the two have optioned 275 acres so far. They say they are spending about $300,000 for the planning work during the meetings that will end on Saturday. Those who have reserved spaces in Laurent will be expected to put down $1,000 deposits for condominiums and home lots within the next few months.
For many of those people - from states like California, Florida and New York - a move to prairie land in South Dakota (population 760,000) would seem to be an enormous culture shock. But they plan to start businesses like shops and restaurants, gas stations and hotels, and the benefits, many of them say, outweigh any concerns they have about the location.
Lawrence J. Brick, a retired school administrator from Philadelphia, said Laurent held attractions that most hearing people would struggle even to grasp: no longer having to shy away from the neighbors, fearing he could not communicate; no longer having to guess what a store clerk is saying about a price; no longer having to apologize for being deaf.
Although some people argue that Laurent might isolate deaf people, H-Dirksen L. Bauman, who directs the master's program in deaf studies at Gallaudet University, said the plans actually marked an important collaboration between the deaf and the hearing, one of a sort not always encouraged by the deaf community. This is especially significant, he said, as more hearing people are learning American Sign Language, now the fifth most-studied language on college campuses.
"Hearing people are not welcomed in deaf residential schools, in deaf clubs," Mr. Bauman said. "But there is no audiogram you will need to buy land in Laurent, South Dakota. There's simply a commitment to live in a visually centered environment that supports manual as opposed to spoken language."
But Dr. Michael Novak of Urbana, Ill., who has been performing cochlear implants since 1984, said he was convinced that the trend among the deaf was actually shifting toward therapies that could help the next generation of deaf people use spoken language.
"Communities like this have a real place for people who cannot or choose not to use the hearing technology," Dr. Novak said of Laurent. "But over time, that number will be reducing." He wonders then, he said, if the future of a notion like Laurent might fade away.
For his part, though, Mr. Miller said reports of the "death of sign language and deaf culture continue to be greatly exaggerated." Not everyone, he said, is eligible for or would even want to receive technologies like cochlear implants. "I do not want one for myself," he said. "I am very happy being deaf. To me, this is like asking a black or Asian person if he/she would take a pill to turn into a white person."
One on the Olmecs.
Mother Culture, or Only a Sister?
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
On a coastal flood plain etched by rivers flowing through swamps and alongside fields of maize and beans, the people archaeologists call the Olmecs lived in a society of emergent complexity. It was more than 3,000 years ago along the Gulf of Mexico around Veracruz.
The Olmecs, mobilized by ambitious rulers and fortified by a pantheon of gods, moved a veritable mountain of earth to create a plateau above the plain, and there planted a city, the ruins of which are known today as San Lorenzo. They left behind palace remnants, distinctive pottery and art with anthropomorphic jaguar motifs. Most impressive were Olmec sculptures: colossal stone heads with thick lips and staring eyes that are assumed to be monuments to revered rulers.
The Olmecs are widely regarded as creators of the first civilization in Mesoamerica, the area encompassing much of Mexico and Central America, and a cultural wellspring of later societies, notably the Maya. Some scholars think the Olmec civilization was the first anywhere in America, though doubt has been cast by recent discoveries in Peru.
Archaeologists have split sharply over how much influence the Olmecs had on contemporary and subsequent Mesoamerican cultures. Were Olmecs the "mother" culture? Or were they one among "sister" cultures whose interactions through the region produced shared attributes of religion, art, political structure and hierarchical society?
Last month, the simmering pot of mother-sister controversy was stirred anew by Dr. Jeffrey P. Blomster, an Olmec archaeologist at George Washington University. In a report in the journal Science, he and other researchers described evidence of the widespread export of Olmec ceramics that they said supported "Olmec priority in the creation and spread of the first unified style and iconographic system in Mesoamerica."
Dr. Blomster's team analyzed the chemistry of 725 pieces of pottery decorated with symbols and designs in the Olmec style and collected throughout the region. The researchers compared the composition of the ceramics with local clays. They determined that most of these were not imitations of the Olmec style made by local potters. In a significant number of pots, the clay matched the chemistry of material found around San Lorenzo.
"The evidence is overwhelming that San Lorenzo, the first Olmec capital, was doing the exporting," Dr. Blomster said. "The Olmecs were disseminating their culture and it was something of great interest to others."
The research, he added, showed that San Lorenzo did not appear to be importing artifacts emblematic of other cultures or that regional contemporaries were exchanging such material with one another. The city on the artificial plateau seemed to be the hub of regional culture and central, he said, to understanding the origin and development of complex society in Mesoamerica.
Dr. Richard A. Diehl of the University of Alabama wrote in Science that the findings "provide powerful support for the mother-culture school," adding, "San Lorenzo thus dominated in the commercial relationships and attendant spread of Olmec iconography and belief systems."
But Dr. Diehl, a proponent of the mother school and the author of "The Olmec," published last year, said in an interview that the "connections we are seeing may not have lasted more than a generation, perhaps the time of a particular ruler, and at most, not more than a century or century and a half."
The Blomster research dealt with pottery from the latter half of the early formative period of Mesoamerican culture, which extended from 1500 to 900 B.C. The last centuries of this period were the time of San Lorenzo's ascendance, but afterward the city was largely abandoned and the Olmec hub gravitated to La Venta, nearby in what is now the state of Tabasco.
Dr. Blomster collaborated with Dr. Hector Neff, an archaeologist at California State University, Long Beach, and Dr. Michael D. Glascock of the Research Reactor Center at the University of Missouri. The Missouri center analyzed the pottery and clay samples from San Lorenzo and six other Mexican sites from the era of Olmec prominence.
Proponents of the sister school are not letting the interpretation of the new research go unchallenged. They may be a minority in Mesoamerican studies, but a vocal and formidable one, including such stalwarts as Dr. Kent V. Flannery and Dr. Joyce Marcus of the University of Michigan and Dr. David C. Grove, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois.
Dr. Grove disputed Dr. Blomster's conclusions, saying that the research demonstrated only that Olmec pottery was traded, not that the trade disseminated Olmec political and religious concepts around the region. Others questioned the assertion that no pottery of other cultures had found its way to San Lorenzo.
The mother-culture advocates, said Dr. Susan D. Gillespie, a Mesoamerican archaeologist at the University of Florida, who is married to Dr. Grove, were "flogging a dead horse, the idea that the Olmec invented civilization, carried it to all of Mesoamerica and it's the basis of the Maya."
Dr. Gillespie acknowledged that the Olmecs established a vibrant culture and that their accomplishments were extraordinary. She also agreed that they were innovative and that their leaders presided over a political system capable of mobilizing labor for public works. It was no easy task raising an artificial plateau or hauling heavy blocks of basalt 40 miles to San Lorenzo from volcanic fields and fashioning them into the stone heads that stand as high as 10 feet.
Olmecs also contributed games with rubber balls, which became popular and fiercely played by later regional cultures. The Aztecs, much later, used the name in their own language for "rubber people" - Olmec - to describe the culture that was by then long vanished but not forgotten. No one knows what the ancient Olmecs called themselves.
"But others in the area were doing things equally complex, though different," Dr. Gillespie said. "Other areas were also taking steps on their own toward the development of Mesoamerican civilization."
That, and an active interchange of ideas and beliefs among various neighboring societies, is the essence of the argument advanced by sister-culture proponents. They further contend that the concept of the Olmecs as a mother culture grew out of 19th-century ethnocentrism, in which the construction of stone sculptures is a sign of civilization because that is a hallmark of early Western civilizations.
Many of these archaeologists have concentrated their research and excavations on non-Olmec areas with evidence of ancient complex societies, like the Valley of Oaxaca, the central basin of Mexico and the Pacific coastal sites of Chiapas in southwestern Mexico. Dr. Gillespie, though, has studied Olmec workshops that were operating in the culture's heyday, mainly producing stone artifacts thought to be altar thrones.
Dr. Blomster cited recent excavations by Dr. Ann Cyphers of the National University of Mexico that "emphasize the higher sociopolitical level that the Olmecs achieved relative to contemporaneous groups in Mesoamerica," a view contrary to the sister-culture position. Dr. Cyphers said the rulers of San Lorenzo appear to have lived in a palace with huge basalt columns and sculptures, while leaders in the adjacent Valley of Oaxaca had places not much better than the wattle-and-daub huts of commoners.
Dr. Michael D. Coe, an archaeologist at Yale who is an authority on the Olmec and the Maya cultures, sides more with the mother-culture school, saying that "much of the complex culture in Mesoamerica has an Olmec origin."
In the new edition of his book "The Maya," Dr. Coe writes that during four centuries of San Lorenzo's prime, ending about 900 B.C., "Olmec influence emanating from this area was found throughout Mesoamerica, with the curious exception of the Maya domain - perhaps because there were few Maya populations at that time sufficiently large to have interested the expanding Olmecs."
But early Olmec rulers were aware of the territory where the Maya eventually established imposing cities. Three years ago, scientists reported finding a rich lode of jadite, including huge boulders of it, in the jungles of Guatemala. Traces of ancient mining were uncovered, and some of the outcroppings were of blue jade, the prized gemstone Olmec artists used for carving delicate human forms and scary masks.
Archaeologists said the discovery not only solved a mystery of the origin of Olmec jade, but also showed that the Olmecs exerted wide influence over the region, either directly or by trade through intermediaries.
The Olmec influence on the Maya began to show up in artifacts, starting before 100 B.C. By then, Dr. Coe and other scholars said, Olmec art, religion, rubber-ball games and the ceremonial dress of rulers had clearly found its way to Maya cities.
Dr. Diehl of Alabama said there was "good evidence that Olmec sculpture is portraying beliefs" also related in Popol Vuh, the epic of creation found in Maya writing. This cosmology predated the Maya and was widespread in Mesoamerica, but its origins are murky.
The classic maize god of the Maya, scholars say, appears to be a clear descendant of a similar Olmec god. A Maya wall painting in San Bartolo, Guatemala, shows a resurrected maize god surrounded by figures offering him gifts of tamales and water. "The deity's head is purely Olmec," Dr. Coe said.
The assumption is that aspects of Olmec culture reached the Maya indirectly, probably through what is known as the Izapa civilization in the territory extending from the Gulf Coast across to the Pacific Coast of Chiapas, in Mexico, and of Guatemala. The city known as Izapa is the site of imposing temple mounds in Chiapas, a place where the Olmec sculpture and Maya painting and glyphs seemed to converge.
Dr. John E. Clark, an archaeologist at Brigham Young University, has excavated in the area for years and is involved with current research, he said, showing strong links between San Lorenzo and ancient sites in Chiapas.
From there, Dr. Clark said, the influence of the Olmecs - not only their art and gods but their kingship and all its trappings - eventually penetrated deep into Maya country and its rising cities. It appeared to be a melding of late Olmec culture with preclassic Maya. Some early carvings of Maya kings, he said, were made on the backs of Olmec jade pieces. A comparison of their art reveals that Maya and late Olmec kings dressed in similar style, resplendent in jade and feather capes like their shared gods.
In his journal commentary, Dr. Diehl supported the Blomster team's research as the largest and most comprehensive study ever conducted on the spread of Olmec pottery.
The research appeared to show, for example, that the exchanges of pottery and presumably other goods were arranged between Olmec rulers and specific foreign lords "rather than the more diffuse trade networks posited by sister-culture proponents," Dr. Diehl said. But left unexplained, he added, was how "this was accomplished and what motivated people on both ends."
Were these truly commercial ventures? Dr. Diehl said there was so far no archaeological evidence suggesting that the Olmecs conquered or proselytized its neighboring societies. Neither is there a clear picture of what happened to San Lorenzo.
Nothing in the ruins or later legends points to conquest by an invading army. More likely, some scientists think, the city was abandoned by the ninth century B.C. because of natural catastrophe: the rivers they depended on probably changed course, the result of silt and tectonic shifts in the coastal landscape.
La Venta, the new capital, came to an equally mysterious end around 400 B.C., and it was not long until the Olmecs lapsed into decline. Pockets of the culture persisted in Tres Zapotes, near the former capitals, and scattered communities in southern Mexico.
By the time the first major civilization of Mesoamerica was disappearing, the Olmecs blending into other societies, it apparently had reached out far enough in trade and influence to pass on a legacy of politics, art and religion to the up-and-coming Maya. A few mother-culture archaeologists, citing the new research, liken the relationship of the Olmecs to the Maya to the Greeks and Romans of Western civilization.
One on euthanasia of infants....
A Crusade Born of a Suffering Infant's Cry
By GREGORY CROUCH
GRONINGEN, The Netherlands
BOUNDING down a metal spiral staircase that resembles a sawed-off strand of DNA, Dr. Eduard Verhagen is wrapping up a tour of what is surely the world's most controversial pediatric ward.
In the last two years, Dr. Verhagen, the clinical director of pediatrics at the University Medical Center Groningen, has presided over the medically induced deaths of four extraordinarily ill newborns.
For his efforts to end what he calls their unbearable and incurable suffering, Dr. Verhagen has been called Dr. Death, a second Hitler and worse - mostly by American opponents of euthanasia. Slowing down to introduce a visitor to a few colleagues, Dr. Verhagen acknowledges his notoriety with a bit of black humor. "He's here to see what the mercy killer is really like," he said.
The pope has condemned infant euthanasia and Dr. Verhagen, indirectly, for advocating it. Hate mail from the United States bombards the hospital's computers with comparisons to the Holocaust. "My first reaction to most of the criticism is: ridiculous, uninformed," Dr. Verhagen said. "Then the question arises in me: How is it possible that people themselves feel free to say such horrible things about other people they don't know?"
Dr. Verhagen is asking people to recognize something many would prefer not even to think about: a few babies are born with conditions so horrific, so excruciatingly painful, that their doctors and even their parents think they would be better off dead.
His push for an open and detailed discussion of such cases could one day, some hope and others fear, lead to the formal legalization of infant euthanasia here.
EUTHANASIA is legal in the Netherlands except for children under 12. But Dr. Verhagen has documented 22 cases of reported infant euthanasia in the last seven years, including the four in his own hospital, and there may be many more - 15 to 20 a year, by one estimate - that no one knows about.
Based on past court decisions on infant euthanasia, in which doctors were acquitted of murder charges, Dutch prosecutors have chosen in recent years not to pursue similar cases.
Dr. Verhagen, 42, wants a team of physicians, together with the baby's parents, to decide openly in very rare, extraordinary cases whether or not to end a child's life. Better that, he said, than a lone pediatrician behind a hospital curtain armed with too much pain reliever. "If you do this, the most important decision man can take, you must do it in a spotlight, you must do it with the curtains opened instead of closed, because it's extremely difficult and you can't be wrong," he said.
Dr. Verhagen grew up in the university town of Leiden, where his mother taught high-school English and his father was a lawyer. He studied both law and medicine before becoming a practicing pediatrician in 1997.
A father of three who spent years tending to sick children in underdeveloped countries, Dr. Verhagen became a pediatrician with the sole intention of saving lives, not ending them. And that's exactly what he did until Sanne was born on his ward four years ago with a severe form of Hallopeau-Siemens syndrome, a rare skin condition.
Her skin would literally come off if anyone touched her, leaving painful scar tissue in its place. The top layers of mucous membranes inside her mouth and esophagus fell away any time she was fed, which was done by tube. In the most optimistic situation, she would live until her 9th or 10th birthday and then die of skin cancer, Dr. Verhagen said.
Sitting in his office, a few of his own children's paintings brightening an otherwise barren scene, Dr. Verhagen tried to evoke the kind of pain he says Sanne was in. He clenched his fists and mimicked the way she balled her tiny hands. Her cry was not that of a normal, healthy baby but the shriek of an extraordinarily sick one. And her vital signs - heartbeat, blood pressure and respiration - reflected those of a child in extreme stress, he said.
Pain relievers seemed to be useless.
Making matters worse, Dr. Verhagen and his colleagues had to bandage Sanne's scar tissue knowing they were contributing to a vicious circle: every time they replaced the bandages, a little more skin fell off. Soon, Dr. Verhagen said, Sanne resembled a mummy.
Her parents demanded an end to her suffering, which moved Dr. Verhagen to consider euthanasia. Fearing criminal prosecution, he and hospital officials refused and eventually sent Sanne home, where she died of pneumonia half a year later.
Dr. Verhagen felt he had failed Sanne and her parents, believing all three had suffered longer than necessary. "We were very unhappy," he said. "We felt like we didn't give good care here."
Somewhat accustomed as chief pediatrician to having the final say, Dr. Verhagen borrowed from his experiences as a two-time entrant in the New York City marathon and kept going. He and his colleagues started familiarizing prosecutors with difficult cases, even including them on daily rounds. And they developed a protocol, published this month in The New England Journal of Medicine, that is both a checklist and a how-to guide for Dutch doctors who are considering ending a baby's life and still want to stay out of jail.
Now, he is suddenly in demand as an expert in the medical and ethical issues surrounding infant euthanasia and not exactly sure what to make of all the fuss.
Recently, one couple with a very sick child flinched when he walked into the room, having recognized him from television. "It's weird," he said. "I want to be a normal pediatrician, not Dr. Death."
The decision to end a child's life is obviously emotional, Dr. Verhagen said, and not just for the parents. Once everyone - doctors, parents and social workers - agrees there is nothing more to be done medically, a time is fixed to start administering a deadly intravenous drip of morphine and midazolam, a sleeping agent.
Advance notice of a couple of days is important, Dr. Verhagen said, so consenting parents have enough time to say goodbye and, in at least the instance of two devoutly religious families, to pray.
DR. VERHAGEN says he has watched one child die and was there moments later for the three others. All had severe forms of spina bifida.
"The child goes to sleep," he said. "It stops breathing."
"I mean, it's difficult to give the right emotion there, but it's beautiful in a way," he said, somewhat aware of how this might sound to a layman. "They are children who are severely ill and in great pain. It is after they die that you see them relaxed for the first time. You see their faces in a way they should be for the first time."
Dr. Verhagen does not admit to doubts about whether he is doing the right thing.
It is, after all, what he would want for his own children, he said.
"If my child would be so ill that it would fall into this category, I would ask someone else to end its life," he said, emphasizing that he could never do it himself. "At that moment, I would be a father and not a doctor."
One on the suicide of a prodigy
One Shot Ends the Life of a Prodigy Who Appeared to Be Ordinary
By KIRK JOHNSON and MONICA DAVEY
DENVER, March 18 - At 18 months old, Brandenn E. Bremmer began to read, his mother says. At 3, he played the piano, finished the schoolwork of an average first grader and announced that he did not care to go back to preschool. At 10, he graduated from high school, his precocious accomplishments drawing the spotlight of the national news media.
This week, at 14, Brandenn died. Sheriff's deputies in his rural Nebraska hometown near the Colorado border said the gunshot wound to his head was apparently a suicide.
Brandenn's life and enormous promise, like that of a handful of other child prodigies in the United States, drew the awe of adults who met him or heard of him or heard some bars of the music that he composed.
His death left them shaken, saying they wondered about the struggle of any life with a foot in each of the two worlds that Brandenn inhabited - a child, but because of his brilliance, not really a child at all.
"He really to me seemed no different than any other normal kid growing up, but yet you still knew that he was different," said Steven Tucker, a farmer who lives not far from the Bremmer family in Venango, Neb.
Brandenn's mother, Patti, who found him shot when she and her husband, Martin, returned home from grocery shopping on Tuesday evening, said that Brandenn, who started college at 11, had been different, to be sure. But he had never been depressed, lonely or pressured to achieve.
"So many people will want to say he was maladjusted or not socially adjusted, but that's just not so at all," Ms. Bremmer said in a telephone interview. "It makes me mad. People need to understand. These kids are so much more intelligent than they are.
"We never pushed Brandenn. He made his own choices. He taught himself to read. If anything, we tried to hold him back a little."
Brandenn left no note, no goodbye. He had seemed cheery earlier in the day, before she left for the store, Ms. Bremmer said. She said he was busy with preparations to become an anesthesiologist, with his friends and with plans for the imminent release of a second CD of music he had composed, in the style, somewhat, of Yanni.
Ms. Bremmer, who writes mystery books and whose family raises and trains dogs, said she took comfort in her sense that Brandenn must have chosen his course because his organs - heart, liver and kidneys - were needed by ailing people.
"He was so in touch with the spiritual world," Ms. Bremmer said. "He was always that way, and we believe he could hear people's needs. He left to save those people."
The vital organs were donated the night he died, as he had long made clear was his wish, she said.
Ms. Bremmer said that she and Mr. Bremmer had always known that Brandenn, who had two much older sisters, was unusual. The day he was born, doctors struggled to find a pulse, she said.
"Things were different right from then," she recalled. "It's almost like my baby died, and an angel took his place."
Still, many who knew him said he seemed quite ordinary, despite the circumstances of his life that might have led, or even been expected to lead, to eccentricity or worse.
He could act like an adult one moment and like a child the next, said Jim Schiefelbein, former principal of University of Nebraska-Lincoln Independent Study High School, which Brandenn started attending at age 6 and finished four years later. Mr. Schiefelbein recalled how at his graduation, Brandenn, then 10, offered a few words of thanks, spoke to the news media and promptly began running around the room with other children at the ceremony.
At Colorado State in Fort Collins, where he took college courses before transferring to a community college in Nebraska closer to home, two professors who knew him described him as reserved, but not withdrawn - clearly set apart in a sea of 18-to-22-year-olds, but not entirely isolated.
Brian Jones, a physics instructor and the director of an outreach project, Little Shop of Physics, which works with junior high school pupils, met Brandenn after a music professor told him about the piano prodigy who was coming to the campus.
Brandenn sat in on physics classes, surrounded by college students, but then participated, as well, in helping younger children who were closer to his age. He was able to play and have fun, Mr. Jones said, but then return the next day and work on his research projects alongside people 10 years his senior.
"I never would have worried about him at all," Mr. Jones said.
Brandenn, his mother said, "had no chronological age."
"He was comfortable with a baby," she said. "And he was comfortable with someone 90 years old."
As Town for Deaf Takes Shape, Debate on Isolation Re-emerges
By MONICA DAVEY
SALEM, S.D. - Standing in an empty field along a wind-swept highway, Marvin T. Miller, who is deaf, envisions the town he wants to create here: a place built around American Sign Language, where teachers in the new school will sign, the town council will hold its debates in sign language and restaurant workers will be required to know how to sign orders.
Nearly 100 families - with people who are deaf, hard of hearing or who can hear but just want to communicate in sign language - have already publicly declared their intention to live in Mr. Miller's village, to be called Laurent, after Laurent Clerc, a French educator of the deaf from the 1800's.
Planners, architects and future residents from various states and other countries are gathering at a camp center in South Dakota on Monday and through the week to draw detailed blueprints for the town, which could accommodate at least 2,500 people. Mr. Miller, who has been imagining this for years, intends to break ground by fall.
"Society isn't doing that great a job of, quote-unquote, integrating us," Mr. Miller, 33, said through an interpreter. "My children don't see role models in their lives: mayors, factory managers, postal workers, business owners. So we're setting up a place to show our unique culture, our unique society."
While deaf enclaves, like the one that existed in Martha's Vineyard decades ago, have cropped up throughout the nation, this would be the first town expressly created for people who sign, its developers say. Even the location, in sparsely populated South Dakota, was selected with the intent of rapidly building political strength for the nation's millions of deaf and hard-of-hearing people, a group that has won few elected offices around the country.
But in the complicated political world of deaf culture, Laurent is an increasingly contentious idea. For some, like Mr. Miller; his wife, Jennifer, who is also deaf; and their four deaf children, it seems the simplest of wishes: to live in a place where they are fully engaged in day-to-day life. Others, however, particularly advocates of technologies that help deaf people use spoken language, wonder whether such a town would merely isolate and exclude the deaf more than ever.
"We think there is a greater benefit for people to be part of the whole world," said Todd Houston, executive director of the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Washington. "I understand the desire to be around people like ourselves, and I don't have a problem with that, but I don't think it's very wise. This is a little bit of circling-the-wagons mentality, if you ask me."
Over the past 15 years, he said, it has become easier for the deaf and hard of hearing to grow up using spoken language, because of a steady rise in the use of cochlear implants, more early diagnoses and therapies for deaf children and efforts to place some deaf children in mainstream schools. That fact has set off intense political debate over what it means to be deaf and what mode of communication - signing or talking - the deaf should focus on.
Those who want to live in Laurent, though, say their intent is not exclusivity at all, but the inclusion of diverse people, especially those who do not have the luxury of communicating with speech. "We are not building a town for deaf people," said M. E. Barwacz, Mr. Miller's mother-in-law and his business partner in creating Laurent. "We are building a town for sign language users. And one of the biggest groups we expect to have here is hearing parents with deaf children."
Ms. Barwacz, who intends to live in Laurent, is not deaf. She has two daughters, one deaf and one not, and eight grandchildren, four of them deaf. Nationally, experts report that some 90 percent of deaf children are born to hearing parents, setting up a quandary, in some cases, about what language to use in a single household.
As early as the 1800's, deaf leaders debated the possibility of a "deaf state," said Gerard Buckley, an official at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf in Rochester. But the notion came and went. Elsewhere, because of proximity to schools and businesses tied to the deaf, large concentrations of deaf people have gathered in cities like Rochester; Washington; Olathe, Kan.; Frederick, Md.; and Sioux Falls, S.D.
The difference in Laurent, say some among the 92 families who have reserved spaces in the town from as far as London and Australia, is that every element of it would be designed with them in mind. The homes and businesses, they said, would incorporate glass and open space for easy visibility across wide distances. Fire and police services would be designed with more lights and fewer sirens. High-speed Internet connections would be available all over town, since the Internet and Video Relay Service have become vital modes of communication for deaf people. And any shops, businesses or restaurants would be required to be sign-language friendly.
Here in Salem, a dusty 125-year-old farming town of 1,300 three miles from the proposed site of Laurent, people seem unsure of what to make of the idea. "No one has ever come along and tried to start a town," said Joseph Kolbeck, the local barber.
Along the quiet main drag through town, Mr. Miller and Ms. Barwacz, who are originally from Michigan, recently opened a storefront in the old King Koin Laundromat to create and promote Laurent. They moved to Salem not long ago, choosing the area after surveying nearly the entire country looking at factors like population, climate and cost of land.
Some people here wonder how the proposed town of 2,500 would mesh with McCook County's 6,000 residents and its economy of corn, cows and pigs. Others say they doubt Laurent will ever become reality.
Mr. Miller and Ms. Barwacz have revealed little about the costs and their plans for financing Laurent. They say they are using family money, as well as some from a group of "angel investors," led by a man with a deaf daughter who wishes to remain anonymous. First Dakota National Bank is helping to secure financing, and the two have optioned 275 acres so far. They say they are spending about $300,000 for the planning work during the meetings that will end on Saturday. Those who have reserved spaces in Laurent will be expected to put down $1,000 deposits for condominiums and home lots within the next few months.
For many of those people - from states like California, Florida and New York - a move to prairie land in South Dakota (population 760,000) would seem to be an enormous culture shock. But they plan to start businesses like shops and restaurants, gas stations and hotels, and the benefits, many of them say, outweigh any concerns they have about the location.
Lawrence J. Brick, a retired school administrator from Philadelphia, said Laurent held attractions that most hearing people would struggle even to grasp: no longer having to shy away from the neighbors, fearing he could not communicate; no longer having to guess what a store clerk is saying about a price; no longer having to apologize for being deaf.
Although some people argue that Laurent might isolate deaf people, H-Dirksen L. Bauman, who directs the master's program in deaf studies at Gallaudet University, said the plans actually marked an important collaboration between the deaf and the hearing, one of a sort not always encouraged by the deaf community. This is especially significant, he said, as more hearing people are learning American Sign Language, now the fifth most-studied language on college campuses.
"Hearing people are not welcomed in deaf residential schools, in deaf clubs," Mr. Bauman said. "But there is no audiogram you will need to buy land in Laurent, South Dakota. There's simply a commitment to live in a visually centered environment that supports manual as opposed to spoken language."
But Dr. Michael Novak of Urbana, Ill., who has been performing cochlear implants since 1984, said he was convinced that the trend among the deaf was actually shifting toward therapies that could help the next generation of deaf people use spoken language.
"Communities like this have a real place for people who cannot or choose not to use the hearing technology," Dr. Novak said of Laurent. "But over time, that number will be reducing." He wonders then, he said, if the future of a notion like Laurent might fade away.
For his part, though, Mr. Miller said reports of the "death of sign language and deaf culture continue to be greatly exaggerated." Not everyone, he said, is eligible for or would even want to receive technologies like cochlear implants. "I do not want one for myself," he said. "I am very happy being deaf. To me, this is like asking a black or Asian person if he/she would take a pill to turn into a white person."
One on the Olmecs.
Mother Culture, or Only a Sister?
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
On a coastal flood plain etched by rivers flowing through swamps and alongside fields of maize and beans, the people archaeologists call the Olmecs lived in a society of emergent complexity. It was more than 3,000 years ago along the Gulf of Mexico around Veracruz.
The Olmecs, mobilized by ambitious rulers and fortified by a pantheon of gods, moved a veritable mountain of earth to create a plateau above the plain, and there planted a city, the ruins of which are known today as San Lorenzo. They left behind palace remnants, distinctive pottery and art with anthropomorphic jaguar motifs. Most impressive were Olmec sculptures: colossal stone heads with thick lips and staring eyes that are assumed to be monuments to revered rulers.
The Olmecs are widely regarded as creators of the first civilization in Mesoamerica, the area encompassing much of Mexico and Central America, and a cultural wellspring of later societies, notably the Maya. Some scholars think the Olmec civilization was the first anywhere in America, though doubt has been cast by recent discoveries in Peru.
Archaeologists have split sharply over how much influence the Olmecs had on contemporary and subsequent Mesoamerican cultures. Were Olmecs the "mother" culture? Or were they one among "sister" cultures whose interactions through the region produced shared attributes of religion, art, political structure and hierarchical society?
Last month, the simmering pot of mother-sister controversy was stirred anew by Dr. Jeffrey P. Blomster, an Olmec archaeologist at George Washington University. In a report in the journal Science, he and other researchers described evidence of the widespread export of Olmec ceramics that they said supported "Olmec priority in the creation and spread of the first unified style and iconographic system in Mesoamerica."
Dr. Blomster's team analyzed the chemistry of 725 pieces of pottery decorated with symbols and designs in the Olmec style and collected throughout the region. The researchers compared the composition of the ceramics with local clays. They determined that most of these were not imitations of the Olmec style made by local potters. In a significant number of pots, the clay matched the chemistry of material found around San Lorenzo.
"The evidence is overwhelming that San Lorenzo, the first Olmec capital, was doing the exporting," Dr. Blomster said. "The Olmecs were disseminating their culture and it was something of great interest to others."
The research, he added, showed that San Lorenzo did not appear to be importing artifacts emblematic of other cultures or that regional contemporaries were exchanging such material with one another. The city on the artificial plateau seemed to be the hub of regional culture and central, he said, to understanding the origin and development of complex society in Mesoamerica.
Dr. Richard A. Diehl of the University of Alabama wrote in Science that the findings "provide powerful support for the mother-culture school," adding, "San Lorenzo thus dominated in the commercial relationships and attendant spread of Olmec iconography and belief systems."
But Dr. Diehl, a proponent of the mother school and the author of "The Olmec," published last year, said in an interview that the "connections we are seeing may not have lasted more than a generation, perhaps the time of a particular ruler, and at most, not more than a century or century and a half."
The Blomster research dealt with pottery from the latter half of the early formative period of Mesoamerican culture, which extended from 1500 to 900 B.C. The last centuries of this period were the time of San Lorenzo's ascendance, but afterward the city was largely abandoned and the Olmec hub gravitated to La Venta, nearby in what is now the state of Tabasco.
Dr. Blomster collaborated with Dr. Hector Neff, an archaeologist at California State University, Long Beach, and Dr. Michael D. Glascock of the Research Reactor Center at the University of Missouri. The Missouri center analyzed the pottery and clay samples from San Lorenzo and six other Mexican sites from the era of Olmec prominence.
Proponents of the sister school are not letting the interpretation of the new research go unchallenged. They may be a minority in Mesoamerican studies, but a vocal and formidable one, including such stalwarts as Dr. Kent V. Flannery and Dr. Joyce Marcus of the University of Michigan and Dr. David C. Grove, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois.
Dr. Grove disputed Dr. Blomster's conclusions, saying that the research demonstrated only that Olmec pottery was traded, not that the trade disseminated Olmec political and religious concepts around the region. Others questioned the assertion that no pottery of other cultures had found its way to San Lorenzo.
The mother-culture advocates, said Dr. Susan D. Gillespie, a Mesoamerican archaeologist at the University of Florida, who is married to Dr. Grove, were "flogging a dead horse, the idea that the Olmec invented civilization, carried it to all of Mesoamerica and it's the basis of the Maya."
Dr. Gillespie acknowledged that the Olmecs established a vibrant culture and that their accomplishments were extraordinary. She also agreed that they were innovative and that their leaders presided over a political system capable of mobilizing labor for public works. It was no easy task raising an artificial plateau or hauling heavy blocks of basalt 40 miles to San Lorenzo from volcanic fields and fashioning them into the stone heads that stand as high as 10 feet.
Olmecs also contributed games with rubber balls, which became popular and fiercely played by later regional cultures. The Aztecs, much later, used the name in their own language for "rubber people" - Olmec - to describe the culture that was by then long vanished but not forgotten. No one knows what the ancient Olmecs called themselves.
"But others in the area were doing things equally complex, though different," Dr. Gillespie said. "Other areas were also taking steps on their own toward the development of Mesoamerican civilization."
That, and an active interchange of ideas and beliefs among various neighboring societies, is the essence of the argument advanced by sister-culture proponents. They further contend that the concept of the Olmecs as a mother culture grew out of 19th-century ethnocentrism, in which the construction of stone sculptures is a sign of civilization because that is a hallmark of early Western civilizations.
Many of these archaeologists have concentrated their research and excavations on non-Olmec areas with evidence of ancient complex societies, like the Valley of Oaxaca, the central basin of Mexico and the Pacific coastal sites of Chiapas in southwestern Mexico. Dr. Gillespie, though, has studied Olmec workshops that were operating in the culture's heyday, mainly producing stone artifacts thought to be altar thrones.
Dr. Blomster cited recent excavations by Dr. Ann Cyphers of the National University of Mexico that "emphasize the higher sociopolitical level that the Olmecs achieved relative to contemporaneous groups in Mesoamerica," a view contrary to the sister-culture position. Dr. Cyphers said the rulers of San Lorenzo appear to have lived in a palace with huge basalt columns and sculptures, while leaders in the adjacent Valley of Oaxaca had places not much better than the wattle-and-daub huts of commoners.
Dr. Michael D. Coe, an archaeologist at Yale who is an authority on the Olmec and the Maya cultures, sides more with the mother-culture school, saying that "much of the complex culture in Mesoamerica has an Olmec origin."
In the new edition of his book "The Maya," Dr. Coe writes that during four centuries of San Lorenzo's prime, ending about 900 B.C., "Olmec influence emanating from this area was found throughout Mesoamerica, with the curious exception of the Maya domain - perhaps because there were few Maya populations at that time sufficiently large to have interested the expanding Olmecs."
But early Olmec rulers were aware of the territory where the Maya eventually established imposing cities. Three years ago, scientists reported finding a rich lode of jadite, including huge boulders of it, in the jungles of Guatemala. Traces of ancient mining were uncovered, and some of the outcroppings were of blue jade, the prized gemstone Olmec artists used for carving delicate human forms and scary masks.
Archaeologists said the discovery not only solved a mystery of the origin of Olmec jade, but also showed that the Olmecs exerted wide influence over the region, either directly or by trade through intermediaries.
The Olmec influence on the Maya began to show up in artifacts, starting before 100 B.C. By then, Dr. Coe and other scholars said, Olmec art, religion, rubber-ball games and the ceremonial dress of rulers had clearly found its way to Maya cities.
Dr. Diehl of Alabama said there was "good evidence that Olmec sculpture is portraying beliefs" also related in Popol Vuh, the epic of creation found in Maya writing. This cosmology predated the Maya and was widespread in Mesoamerica, but its origins are murky.
The classic maize god of the Maya, scholars say, appears to be a clear descendant of a similar Olmec god. A Maya wall painting in San Bartolo, Guatemala, shows a resurrected maize god surrounded by figures offering him gifts of tamales and water. "The deity's head is purely Olmec," Dr. Coe said.
The assumption is that aspects of Olmec culture reached the Maya indirectly, probably through what is known as the Izapa civilization in the territory extending from the Gulf Coast across to the Pacific Coast of Chiapas, in Mexico, and of Guatemala. The city known as Izapa is the site of imposing temple mounds in Chiapas, a place where the Olmec sculpture and Maya painting and glyphs seemed to converge.
Dr. John E. Clark, an archaeologist at Brigham Young University, has excavated in the area for years and is involved with current research, he said, showing strong links between San Lorenzo and ancient sites in Chiapas.
From there, Dr. Clark said, the influence of the Olmecs - not only their art and gods but their kingship and all its trappings - eventually penetrated deep into Maya country and its rising cities. It appeared to be a melding of late Olmec culture with preclassic Maya. Some early carvings of Maya kings, he said, were made on the backs of Olmec jade pieces. A comparison of their art reveals that Maya and late Olmec kings dressed in similar style, resplendent in jade and feather capes like their shared gods.
In his journal commentary, Dr. Diehl supported the Blomster team's research as the largest and most comprehensive study ever conducted on the spread of Olmec pottery.
The research appeared to show, for example, that the exchanges of pottery and presumably other goods were arranged between Olmec rulers and specific foreign lords "rather than the more diffuse trade networks posited by sister-culture proponents," Dr. Diehl said. But left unexplained, he added, was how "this was accomplished and what motivated people on both ends."
Were these truly commercial ventures? Dr. Diehl said there was so far no archaeological evidence suggesting that the Olmecs conquered or proselytized its neighboring societies. Neither is there a clear picture of what happened to San Lorenzo.
Nothing in the ruins or later legends points to conquest by an invading army. More likely, some scientists think, the city was abandoned by the ninth century B.C. because of natural catastrophe: the rivers they depended on probably changed course, the result of silt and tectonic shifts in the coastal landscape.
La Venta, the new capital, came to an equally mysterious end around 400 B.C., and it was not long until the Olmecs lapsed into decline. Pockets of the culture persisted in Tres Zapotes, near the former capitals, and scattered communities in southern Mexico.
By the time the first major civilization of Mesoamerica was disappearing, the Olmecs blending into other societies, it apparently had reached out far enough in trade and influence to pass on a legacy of politics, art and religion to the up-and-coming Maya. A few mother-culture archaeologists, citing the new research, liken the relationship of the Olmecs to the Maya to the Greeks and Romans of Western civilization.
One on euthanasia of infants....
A Crusade Born of a Suffering Infant's Cry
By GREGORY CROUCH
GRONINGEN, The Netherlands
BOUNDING down a metal spiral staircase that resembles a sawed-off strand of DNA, Dr. Eduard Verhagen is wrapping up a tour of what is surely the world's most controversial pediatric ward.
In the last two years, Dr. Verhagen, the clinical director of pediatrics at the University Medical Center Groningen, has presided over the medically induced deaths of four extraordinarily ill newborns.
For his efforts to end what he calls their unbearable and incurable suffering, Dr. Verhagen has been called Dr. Death, a second Hitler and worse - mostly by American opponents of euthanasia. Slowing down to introduce a visitor to a few colleagues, Dr. Verhagen acknowledges his notoriety with a bit of black humor. "He's here to see what the mercy killer is really like," he said.
The pope has condemned infant euthanasia and Dr. Verhagen, indirectly, for advocating it. Hate mail from the United States bombards the hospital's computers with comparisons to the Holocaust. "My first reaction to most of the criticism is: ridiculous, uninformed," Dr. Verhagen said. "Then the question arises in me: How is it possible that people themselves feel free to say such horrible things about other people they don't know?"
Dr. Verhagen is asking people to recognize something many would prefer not even to think about: a few babies are born with conditions so horrific, so excruciatingly painful, that their doctors and even their parents think they would be better off dead.
His push for an open and detailed discussion of such cases could one day, some hope and others fear, lead to the formal legalization of infant euthanasia here.
EUTHANASIA is legal in the Netherlands except for children under 12. But Dr. Verhagen has documented 22 cases of reported infant euthanasia in the last seven years, including the four in his own hospital, and there may be many more - 15 to 20 a year, by one estimate - that no one knows about.
Based on past court decisions on infant euthanasia, in which doctors were acquitted of murder charges, Dutch prosecutors have chosen in recent years not to pursue similar cases.
Dr. Verhagen, 42, wants a team of physicians, together with the baby's parents, to decide openly in very rare, extraordinary cases whether or not to end a child's life. Better that, he said, than a lone pediatrician behind a hospital curtain armed with too much pain reliever. "If you do this, the most important decision man can take, you must do it in a spotlight, you must do it with the curtains opened instead of closed, because it's extremely difficult and you can't be wrong," he said.
Dr. Verhagen grew up in the university town of Leiden, where his mother taught high-school English and his father was a lawyer. He studied both law and medicine before becoming a practicing pediatrician in 1997.
A father of three who spent years tending to sick children in underdeveloped countries, Dr. Verhagen became a pediatrician with the sole intention of saving lives, not ending them. And that's exactly what he did until Sanne was born on his ward four years ago with a severe form of Hallopeau-Siemens syndrome, a rare skin condition.
Her skin would literally come off if anyone touched her, leaving painful scar tissue in its place. The top layers of mucous membranes inside her mouth and esophagus fell away any time she was fed, which was done by tube. In the most optimistic situation, she would live until her 9th or 10th birthday and then die of skin cancer, Dr. Verhagen said.
Sitting in his office, a few of his own children's paintings brightening an otherwise barren scene, Dr. Verhagen tried to evoke the kind of pain he says Sanne was in. He clenched his fists and mimicked the way she balled her tiny hands. Her cry was not that of a normal, healthy baby but the shriek of an extraordinarily sick one. And her vital signs - heartbeat, blood pressure and respiration - reflected those of a child in extreme stress, he said.
Pain relievers seemed to be useless.
Making matters worse, Dr. Verhagen and his colleagues had to bandage Sanne's scar tissue knowing they were contributing to a vicious circle: every time they replaced the bandages, a little more skin fell off. Soon, Dr. Verhagen said, Sanne resembled a mummy.
Her parents demanded an end to her suffering, which moved Dr. Verhagen to consider euthanasia. Fearing criminal prosecution, he and hospital officials refused and eventually sent Sanne home, where she died of pneumonia half a year later.
Dr. Verhagen felt he had failed Sanne and her parents, believing all three had suffered longer than necessary. "We were very unhappy," he said. "We felt like we didn't give good care here."
Somewhat accustomed as chief pediatrician to having the final say, Dr. Verhagen borrowed from his experiences as a two-time entrant in the New York City marathon and kept going. He and his colleagues started familiarizing prosecutors with difficult cases, even including them on daily rounds. And they developed a protocol, published this month in The New England Journal of Medicine, that is both a checklist and a how-to guide for Dutch doctors who are considering ending a baby's life and still want to stay out of jail.
Now, he is suddenly in demand as an expert in the medical and ethical issues surrounding infant euthanasia and not exactly sure what to make of all the fuss.
Recently, one couple with a very sick child flinched when he walked into the room, having recognized him from television. "It's weird," he said. "I want to be a normal pediatrician, not Dr. Death."
The decision to end a child's life is obviously emotional, Dr. Verhagen said, and not just for the parents. Once everyone - doctors, parents and social workers - agrees there is nothing more to be done medically, a time is fixed to start administering a deadly intravenous drip of morphine and midazolam, a sleeping agent.
Advance notice of a couple of days is important, Dr. Verhagen said, so consenting parents have enough time to say goodbye and, in at least the instance of two devoutly religious families, to pray.
DR. VERHAGEN says he has watched one child die and was there moments later for the three others. All had severe forms of spina bifida.
"The child goes to sleep," he said. "It stops breathing."
"I mean, it's difficult to give the right emotion there, but it's beautiful in a way," he said, somewhat aware of how this might sound to a layman. "They are children who are severely ill and in great pain. It is after they die that you see them relaxed for the first time. You see their faces in a way they should be for the first time."
Dr. Verhagen does not admit to doubts about whether he is doing the right thing.
It is, after all, what he would want for his own children, he said.
"If my child would be so ill that it would fall into this category, I would ask someone else to end its life," he said, emphasizing that he could never do it himself. "At that moment, I would be a father and not a doctor."
One on the suicide of a prodigy
One Shot Ends the Life of a Prodigy Who Appeared to Be Ordinary
By KIRK JOHNSON and MONICA DAVEY
DENVER, March 18 - At 18 months old, Brandenn E. Bremmer began to read, his mother says. At 3, he played the piano, finished the schoolwork of an average first grader and announced that he did not care to go back to preschool. At 10, he graduated from high school, his precocious accomplishments drawing the spotlight of the national news media.
This week, at 14, Brandenn died. Sheriff's deputies in his rural Nebraska hometown near the Colorado border said the gunshot wound to his head was apparently a suicide.
Brandenn's life and enormous promise, like that of a handful of other child prodigies in the United States, drew the awe of adults who met him or heard of him or heard some bars of the music that he composed.
His death left them shaken, saying they wondered about the struggle of any life with a foot in each of the two worlds that Brandenn inhabited - a child, but because of his brilliance, not really a child at all.
"He really to me seemed no different than any other normal kid growing up, but yet you still knew that he was different," said Steven Tucker, a farmer who lives not far from the Bremmer family in Venango, Neb.
Brandenn's mother, Patti, who found him shot when she and her husband, Martin, returned home from grocery shopping on Tuesday evening, said that Brandenn, who started college at 11, had been different, to be sure. But he had never been depressed, lonely or pressured to achieve.
"So many people will want to say he was maladjusted or not socially adjusted, but that's just not so at all," Ms. Bremmer said in a telephone interview. "It makes me mad. People need to understand. These kids are so much more intelligent than they are.
"We never pushed Brandenn. He made his own choices. He taught himself to read. If anything, we tried to hold him back a little."
Brandenn left no note, no goodbye. He had seemed cheery earlier in the day, before she left for the store, Ms. Bremmer said. She said he was busy with preparations to become an anesthesiologist, with his friends and with plans for the imminent release of a second CD of music he had composed, in the style, somewhat, of Yanni.
Ms. Bremmer, who writes mystery books and whose family raises and trains dogs, said she took comfort in her sense that Brandenn must have chosen his course because his organs - heart, liver and kidneys - were needed by ailing people.
"He was so in touch with the spiritual world," Ms. Bremmer said. "He was always that way, and we believe he could hear people's needs. He left to save those people."
The vital organs were donated the night he died, as he had long made clear was his wish, she said.
Ms. Bremmer said that she and Mr. Bremmer had always known that Brandenn, who had two much older sisters, was unusual. The day he was born, doctors struggled to find a pulse, she said.
"Things were different right from then," she recalled. "It's almost like my baby died, and an angel took his place."
Still, many who knew him said he seemed quite ordinary, despite the circumstances of his life that might have led, or even been expected to lead, to eccentricity or worse.
He could act like an adult one moment and like a child the next, said Jim Schiefelbein, former principal of University of Nebraska-Lincoln Independent Study High School, which Brandenn started attending at age 6 and finished four years later. Mr. Schiefelbein recalled how at his graduation, Brandenn, then 10, offered a few words of thanks, spoke to the news media and promptly began running around the room with other children at the ceremony.
At Colorado State in Fort Collins, where he took college courses before transferring to a community college in Nebraska closer to home, two professors who knew him described him as reserved, but not withdrawn - clearly set apart in a sea of 18-to-22-year-olds, but not entirely isolated.
Brian Jones, a physics instructor and the director of an outreach project, Little Shop of Physics, which works with junior high school pupils, met Brandenn after a music professor told him about the piano prodigy who was coming to the campus.
Brandenn sat in on physics classes, surrounded by college students, but then participated, as well, in helping younger children who were closer to his age. He was able to play and have fun, Mr. Jones said, but then return the next day and work on his research projects alongside people 10 years his senior.
"I never would have worried about him at all," Mr. Jones said.
Brandenn, his mother said, "had no chronological age."
"He was comfortable with a baby," she said. "And he was comfortable with someone 90 years old."
