Consider the case of a young girl named Cameron Mott. At the age of four she began to have violent seizures. The seizures were aggressive: Cameron would suddenly drop to the floor, requiring her to wear a helmet all the time. She was quickly diagnosed with a rare and debilitating disease called Rasmussen’s Encephalitis. Her neurologists knew that this form of epilepsy would lead to paralysis and eventually to death – and so they proposed a drastic surgery. In 2007, in an operation that took almost twelve hours, a team of neurosurgeons removed an entire half of Cameron’s brain.
