How Woodpeckers Will Save Football

In 2007, David Smith, a doctor of internal medicine and founder of a company that makes wound dressings, gave a presentation at a medical conference in Maryland. Afterward an audience member, worried by mounting reports of traumatic brain injury from blasts among American soldiers, mentioned, of all things, woodpeckers. If someone could figure out how woodpeckers do it—they slam their beaks into trees thousands of times per day, generating forces far beyond what most people experience in car wrecks—then maybe we could better protect soldiers.

The question sent Smith’s own head spinning. “I knew instantaneously that this was something woefully overlooked,” Smith said. Nature was full of animals that routinely generated massive forces on their brains without apparent damage. They included bighorn sheep; whales that ram each other; and birds that dive headlong, at 500 feet per second, into the water. How did the animals avoid brain injury?

The animals’ secrets wouldn’t apply just to soldiers, Smith knew. Reports were accumulating of a dementia-like syndrome that afflicted former football players, called chronic traumatic encephalopathy. The condition, scientists thought, wasn’t necessarily caused by full-blown concussions—the kind that knock you