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Oliver Sacks, the neurologist who brought us Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, tells David Cohen about his “lost years” in California, his subsequent life as an alien and how cancer gave him the opportunity to experiment on himself for his latest book

FOR his 76th birthday, Oliver Sacks received an ounce of osmium, the densest natural element in the periodic table. “I like density, and it’s the only really blue metal, it’s rather beautiful,” he says. The year before he got a “nice rod of rhenium” and …