Headstrong, an Off-Broadway play about a former NFL player living with post-concussion syndrome, premieres.

May 2: Goodell suspends four Saints players, including Jonathan Vilma and Scott Fujita, a member of the NFL Players Association executive committee who has advocated for independent neurologists to be on the sidelines. That same day, Junior Seau, a future Hall of Famer who did not have a diagnosed history of concussions, was found dead with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest — the same awful methodology Dave Duerson chose when he killed himself, leaving a suicide note asking that his brain be left in care of Ann McKee and her team. The findings of CTE in Duerson's brain were released on May 2, 2011.

June 13: Pop Warner football, which registered more than 285,000 children ages 5-15 to play in 2011, bans head-to-head hits and limits contact in practice to 40 minutes a day.

That night, Terry Bradshaw, the former Steelers quarterback who now receives treatment for short-term memory loss at the Amen Clinic in Newport Beach, California, told Jay Leno: "In the next decade, we will not see football as it is."

It is a measure of the sea change in public perception that Junior Seau was immediately popularly diagnosed with CTE, despite the existence of personal problems that might have played a role in the suicide. On July 12, his family announced that part of his brain tissue had been donated to the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke for study. Two weeks later, Goodell announced the creation of NFL Total Wellness, a new program of mental health benefits, including Life Line, a free telephone service staffed by mental health professionals and suicide prevention experts. The next day the medical examiner in Richmond, Virginia, confirmed a diagnosis of CTE in Easterling's brain.

The potential cost of employment in McKee's favorite sport is never far from her mind. She reaches for Green Bay Brett and flicks his molded-plastic noggin with her finger. The oversize head bobbles and wags, lurching back and forth on its spring like a kid trying out a pogo stick. Only the smirk on his prefab mug remains fixed.

"Get the irony?" she says.

Over the last four years, McKee has become the most visible member of a cohort of research scientists and family members — wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters of the dead, dying, and demented — who have forced the issue of chronic brain trauma into the forefront of American consciousness. The process has engendered enormous publicity as well as criticism and jealousy in the scientific community, which is every bit as competitive as the NFL. Her work has brought "a great deal of acclaim, exposure, and recognition," says neurosurgeon Robert Cantu, clinical professor of neurosurgery at Boston University and co-director of CSTE. "But at the same time it's brought a great deal of pressure. Not everybody greets her findings with the same degree of enthusiasm."

War-painted denizens of the upper deck may view her as The Woman Trying To Destroy Football. In fact, she is The Woman Trying To Save Football From Itself. The process has engendered a particular intimacy with those who entrust their loved ones to her posthumous care. Virginia Grimsley, whose husband, John, was the first NFL player diagnosed by McKee, says, "He's in good hands with her. They're all in good hands with her.

"If Joe Six-Pack was as educated as the wives that have gone through this and as Dr. McKee, Joe Six-Pack would sit down, shut up, and continue to drink his six-pack," Grimsley says. "She's not trying to destroy football."

McKee says: "I'm just trying to tell football what I see."

What she sees through her microscope is mediated by a painterly sensibility that suffuses how she talks about her work, how she approaches it, and how she presents it. She was an art major freshman year at the University of Wisconsin. She gave it up in favor of making a living, but she never quit making art. "I think you have to be creative to make a difference in science," she says. "So being artistic, it's not always going with what is accepted. I'm not your run-of-the-mill scientist."

It took an artist to see beyond Joe Theismann's splintered tibia, Johnny U's gnarled fingers, and Bo Jackson's necrotic hip to the head-banging obvious and to grasp the importance of aesthetics in changing public opinion. "Actually, I do think that makes a big difference," she says. "I think that laying out something in a visually pleasing way is very important. I look at Mad Men and how you advertise to get your point across. In order to swing public perception and gain acceptance for your work, you have to be your own advertising firm."

She photographs every brain before autopsy and memorializes slivers of tissue in irrefutable portraits of disease that line the hallways of her lab. Exhibit A: a montage she created from sections of 27 damaged brains, white matter arranged like so many Marilyn Monroes by Andy Warhol. "This is Eric Scoggins," she says. "This is Wally Hilgenberg. This is Mike Borich, a college player. We got it from the coroner, so it's not a complete section. This is John Grimsley. This is Dave Duerson. Up here we have Derek Boogaard, the hockey player."

Some painters revisit a single image again and again — a billowing sail or perhaps a lily pond — finding the particular in the generic. Tau, a protein in brain cells that turns rogue with repeated trauma, is McKee's subject; the brain is her canvas. "If you look at the paintings of Van Gogh, he saw things other people didn't see," Hovda says. "Good neuropathologists see things through a microscope that you and I don't see clearly, and I have spent a lot of time looking through a microscope. It's because they have an artistic appreciation for what they are seeing and the ability to recognize it as pathology. She has demonstrated pathology in a way that is beautiful and irrefutable."

To gaze upon McKee's montage is to see the unseen. Daniel Perl, professor of pathology/neuropathology at the Uniformed Services University in Bethesda, Maryland, who has known and worked with McKee for two decades, says: "I think she has completely changed the way we see the experience of playing football."

Can I see a brain?" I ask.

"Sure, we can go to the morgue," she says.

She leads the way down the hall to an unprepossessing room in an unprepossessing brick building on the campus of the Edith Nourse Rogers Memorial Veterans Hospital. Currently, there are 125 brains registered to the Brain Bank, among them 21 veterans who experienced mild traumatic brain injury. Chris Nowinski, co-director of CSTE and founder of the Sports Legacy Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to concussion awareness, secures the...