About The Author.

James William Tetrud was born in January 1940 in Lewiston, Minnesota, a farm town of about 1,500 people. According to Tetrud Family lore, he was born on the kitchen table during a snowstorm. It was the middle of a Minnesota winter, and three days passed before the roads were safe enough to drive to the hospital, where they checked in. The family moved to Minneapolis when he was two. His only sibling, his sister Linda, whom he adores, was born five years after him, and now lives in Illinois with her husband Don, close to her 2 children and grandchild. 

James’ father, Bill, was a civil engineer who worked with the Civilian Conservation Corps and the US Army. His mother, Betty, came from a large Irish family and was very sweet, known and loved by her grandchildren for her ever-filled candy goblet. The Tetruds were Norwegian on his father's side; his grandfather had immigrated from Norway along with 3 brothers to start a farm. Actually, the family still hosts the occasional reunion on some of that land, right near the family cemetery. 

As a boy, James loved reading and telling scary stories, pulling pranks on the neighborhood kids, and shocking them with his tall tales. But as his schooling continued, he discovered he had a penchant for math and science, making less time for shenanigans as studying proved to be necessary to excel in his studies. 

The seriousness of James' work never got to him. His family describes him as extremely intelligent and just as kind and funny, a product of that Minnesota charm he grew up with.

He earned his electrical engineering degree at the University of Minnesota, then took a job with Hughes Aircraft that sent him to Aachen, Germany, teaching computing to American military personnel. He spent the next few years there with a security clearance, a newly purchased Porsche, and steadily improving high school German, skiing and playing tennis across the neighboring countries on his time off.

Then he went east to New York University for medical school, trading the open spaces of Minneapolis and Europe for skyscrapers. Having just moved around the world, he didn’t have much to his name and spent the first few weeks in NYC at the YMCA until a dorm opened up for him. In medical school, he was considered “the old man” because of his time engineering between college and medical school. James still is close with those medical school buddies - now all old men. 

One summer during medical school, he studied the nervous systems of sea stars at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, where James Watson, a decade past the double helix, had recently taken over as director and was pushing the laboratory into the young field of neurobiology. The sea star was a natural subject: it has no brain, just a ring of nerve tissue around its mouth and a cord running down each arm. It was an example of a nervous system reduced to its essentials, and one scientists still study for how it coordinates movement without any central command. It was an early look at the question that would occupy the rest of his career: how does the nervous system produce movement, and what happens when it fails? He earned his medical degree in 1973, beginning a career in neurology that would span five decades.

That career began in Los Angeles, with a neurology residency and fellowship under Wallace Tourtellotte at UCLA and the West Los Angeles Veterans Administration Medical Center. Three residents were admitted his year, but one fell seriously ill before the program began, so James and the remaining resident split call every other night for the entire first year. The program also required each resident to present a case every week, training that paid off in a career full of talks and case presentations.

He then moved to Northern California to specialize in neurology at Stanford University School of Medicine, and by the early 1980s he was practicing in the South Bay. It was in California that he met Karen Butterfield, who became a physician herself. They married shortly after, and have now been married more than forty-five years.

Two years into his marriage, his work at the county hospital put him in the middle of one of the strangest stories in modern neuroscience. In the summer of 1982, young drug users began arriving in Northern California emergency rooms frozen mid-motion, rigid and mute and immobile, with the full picture of advanced Parkinson's disease at an age decades before anyone should have had it. James was one of the doctors who worked out why: a contaminated batch of synthetic heroin that had destroyed a small and specific region of the brain in a matter of days. The press called the patients the frozen addicts.

What came out of that case changed the field. Researchers had never had a reliable way to test Parkinson's medication; afterward they did, and nearly every experimental Parkinson's therapy of the past four decades has passed through the model it made possible. James went on to design and lead a trial asking whether the same chemistry could be run in reverse, and whether a drug that blocked the toxin might slow the ordinary form of the disease. 

For most of his career, he practiced and did research at the Parkinson's Institute in Sunnyvale, an unusual organization that kept a science laboratory, a clinical trials operation, and a patient clinic under one roof. He led Parkinson's therapy trials there and published on a range of subjects well past that first discovery. Alongside the research was a long clinical practice, with offices in Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, and Stanford, and a range unusually broad for a subspecialist: movement disorders, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's, and migraines. He saw patients daily for decades, listening to their stories as their conditions matured and constantly thinking of ways to make their lives easier.

At the same time as all of this, his house was filling up. He and Karen had their first son in 1986, a second son in 1988, and a daughter in 1991. Two demanding medical careers ran in parallel through those years, Karen at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation and James at the Institute.

And then he would go home and terrify his children.

Bedtime at the Tetrud household was a bit unusual. Each night, instead of the classic children’s tales parents soothed their children with before bed, James told scary stories. He retold Stephen King classics like It, Cujo, and The Mist, with his own twists, of course. He recited Edgar Allan Poe poems like “The Bells” and “The Raven." But mostly, he told them stories of his own invention, improvised on the spot for his kids who begged for nightmares. His kids absolutely loved it (though sleepovers sometimes ended early with the kids’ friends asking to go home because they were so frightened). 

Outside of medicine and horror, James also carries the reputation of a true Minnesotan outdoorsman. Summers meant packing the family into the minivan and camping in Northern California's lush forests. Winters meant driving the winding roads up to Tahoe and skiing. All the kids became experts, learning around age two by holding onto James' and Karen's legs. And every Christmas Eve he still brings a little Minnesota to the family's California home, making a Byerly's-inspired wild rice soup which his family insists is better than the original.

The seriousness of James' work never got to him. His family describes him as extremely intelligent, and just as kind and funny, a product of that Minnesotan charm he grew up with.

James retired a few years ago, volunteering at Stanford for a couple of years before pivoting to focus on his writing. His wife Karen did roughly the same thing. She is retired from the Palo Alto Medical Foundation now and enjoys hiking, painting landscapes, playing piano, and mentoring young physicians. His three children are now grown up and living in California, Texas, and New York.

James' life's work is now taught in neuroscience courses worldwide and has been the subject of books and documentaries. But these days, he is enjoying his classical guitar, cooking for friends and family, his golf game, and finally writing down the stories he once told his children.