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A terrible thing to waste
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Sept. 24, 1999 | You see, researchers cannot study animal brains to learn about mental illness, because animals don't get mentally ill. While some animals -- cats, for example, and dogs small enough to fit into bicycle baskets -- seem to incorporate mental illness as a natural personality feature, animals are not known to have diagnosable brain disorders like Alzheimer's and schizophrenia. So researchers need to study brains of mentally ill humans and, as controls, brains of normal humans like you and me (OK, you). My reasons for becoming a brain donor aren't very good at all. My reasons boil down to a Harvard Brain Bank donor wallet card,which enables me to say "I'm going to Harvard" and not be lying. You do not need brains to go to the Harvard Brain Bank -- only a brain. One fine fall day, I decided to visit my final resting place. The Brain Bank is part of Harvard's McLean Hospital, which sits on a rolling estate of handsome brick buildings just outside Boston. I was directed to the third floor of the Mailman Research Building. The woman pronounced it "Melmon," so as to avoid having to answer stupid questions about what kind of research is being done on mailmen. If you are considering becoming a brain donor, the best thing for you to do is stay away from the Brain Bank. Within 10 minutes of arriving, I was watching a 24-year-old technician named Al slice up a piece of a 67-year-old named Fran. Fran's brain had been flash-frozen and did not slice cleanly. It sliced as does a Butterfinger, with little shards crumbling off. The shards quickly thawed and looked less Butterfinger-like. Al wiped them up with a paper towel: "There goes third grade." Mary Roach Mary Roach's column appears in Salon Health & Body every other Friday.
Al has gotten into trouble for saying things like this. I read a newspaper story in which the reporter asked Al if he planned to donate his brain and he replied, "No way! I'm going out with whatever I came in with!" Now when you ask him, he says quietly, "I'm only 24. I really don't know." The Brain Bank's associate director, Steven Vincent, was showing me around. Down the hall from the dissection room was the computer room. Vincent referred to it as "the brains of the operation," which in any other operation would have been fine, but in this case was a tad confusing. At the end of the hall were the real brains. It wasn't quite what I had imagined. I had pictured whole, intact brains floating in glass jars. But the brains are cut in half, one side being sliced and frozen, the other side sliced and stored in formaldehyde inside Rubbermaid and Frezette food savers. Somehow, I'd expected more of Harvard. If not glass, at least Tupperware. I wondered what the dorms look like these days. Vincent told me there are currently 4,600 specimens in the formaldehyde room. I wrote the number down and then, seconds later, I said, "How many half-brains are in here altogether?" Vincent politely repeated 4,600, though you could tell that what he wanted to say was, "4,601." Earlier I'd asked Fran's age after I'd just been told it. I began to worry that perhaps there wouldn't be a place for my brain at Harvard. "Of course there is," deadpanned Vincent. "See those tiny little freezers down there?"
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