Professor Bryan Jennett has led the world in understanding the devastating unconscious condition termed the vegetative state. New forms of bedside, physiologically oriented ventilators and other supportive devices for maintaining lives around the world started to develop in the late 1940s. Much of this technology was grouped in critical poliomyelitis centres, but after 1955, as polio epidemics became prevented by vaccination, only a few institutions world wide developed critical-care programmes that received all kinds of severely ill patients. These centres required doctors specially trained to handle both medical and surgical crises, but unfortunately it took some years for small hospitals to understand the importance of transferring critically ill patients rapidly to such centers in large teaching hospitals. At this point, in the late 1960s, Professor Jennett and his associates were developing and testing their own, now famous, Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) for traumatic brain injury. Their first goal was to estimate the acute findings of the GCS with the patients' current symptoms and signs. They then compared the initial scale against the patients' ultimate outcomes. The quality of outcome in patients who were immediately referred to the Glasgow University Hospitals was greatly better than those who remained to be treated in smaller hospitals. It was an astonishing success. But even with the best treatment some severely ill patients whose lives had been saved were left with severe permanent brain damage.