4

Disembodied Brains are Extremely Dangerous

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The '50s sci-fi movies were right: Disembodied brains are deadly. When I got to the brain bank, I found it hadn't been organized in any systematic way, and there'd been a bunch of floods. The old containers they used for 50 years weren't airtight. So they'd just wrapped the cases in cellophane. Well, a lot of the fluid just sort of leaked out, pooled on the floor and evaporated, leaving the whole place coated in a thin film of brains. There was only one fan in the building, and it hadn't worked since a British flag flew over New Delhi. Plus it was near the ceiling and formaldehyde is heavier than air, so it wouldn't have worked anyway. Breathing in that room was enough to strip the liquid out of your throat in 10 minutes.

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"It's dryer than Margret Thatcher on Valentine's Day in there."

3

The Equipment Will Maim the Crap Out of You

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We had a collection of ice axes and chisels in the brain bank, and not because of the very reasonable fear of disembodied ghost-zombies. Those giant freezers are so expensive to buy and run that everyone fills them to absolute capacity when they're only meant to be at 50 percent; so they ice up, and the ice is too hard to crack with conventional tools. And you can't heat the whole thing up a little bit, otherwise you end up with cooked brains, which is generally frowned upon outside of an episode of Hannibal.

Sony Pictures Television
"Actually, I only eat free range and fresh."

Most donated brains are cut for slides. These sections are between 1 - 50um (one um is one millionth of a meter, and thinner than almost any cell), so you wind up with a lot of samples. Now you can't cut something that thin without a blade so sharp it makes a scalpel's edge look like the Matterhorn. Traditional gloves provide no protection at all, and if you nick a finger it often goes to the bone. The cut is so fine you don't immediately feel it. It's not uncommon to have to point out to the person cutting that their glove is filling up with blood. Don't worry though: the pain will get there on his sweet time, and he'll bring a shitload of his drunkest friends to help out.

Almost everyone cuts themselves. You don't even notice until a few minutes later when there's blood in a neat line mirroring the movement of your hands. In the old days people had a single huge blade that you screwed in place, and you'd use it until it got blunt, and then move it along. But this thing was so heavy, people would sometimes find the blade embedded halfway through their finger bone. It takes months to heal. Your body doesn't seem to like healing ultrafine cuts.

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Kind of puts your bitching about paper cuts in perspective.

2

It is Way Grosser Than You Think (Even if You Think It's Pretty Gross)

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"Duck Soup" is something I still remember with horror. When you take a brain out, it has no integrity or shape, because we are all just sentient jelly piloting a bone-mech. Put a brain in a bowl, it takes the shape of a bowl. So to chemically fix it, we put it in formaldehyde with some salts, and you leave it there for a couple months. Well, a lot of these brains just got stuck in preservative and filed away for years. And that's how two of my pathologists got to a brain that had been filed away 50 years ago. All I heard from the two veteran pathology technicians who opened it were screams, and then they fled past me as if the grim specter of death was chasing them (which, technically, it was). So I walked over: the smell was like a sledgehammer, and I was pretty resistant at this point. When I finally got close, I found that the original pathologist had put the brain into water instead of formaldehyde when they sealed it. So it had sat there, sealed and stewing away for half a century to become an olfactory WMD primed to detonate two generations later.

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Seriously, this is how Romero movies get started.

Brains are fatty, so they smell even worse than most tissue. I sealed it back up, enclosed it in three layers of biohazard containment, and put it in a safe for disposal to be incinerated. A year later, the tiniest drop got through a crack and hit the floor like the black goo from Prometheus. A medical student with me vomited instantly from the smell. Instantly. Then she ran away. I get goosebumps just remembering it. It was truly revolting. Prometheus was just such a wasted opportunity, you know?

20th Century Fox
"Be careful; everything is trying to hurt us. The aliens, the robot, the script. Everything."

1

Dead Brains are an Impossibly Valuable (and Disappearing) Resource

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It sounds like this facility was the filthiest junkyard of medical science, but make no mistake: The brain bank was one of the greatest scientific resources on Earth. If this were physics it would be CERN. At the time it was one of the largest brain banks anywhere. It had at least 12 million slides pre-stained, hundreds of thousands of lots ... my god, the scale of it.

Every scientist I ever took in there had the same reaction: their jaws just dropped. It's thousands of lifetimes of research material. And yet people fear it. Over the years many people came and went, from security, safety departments, ethics groups, managers, students, technicians and reporters. Every single one fell into groups of loving it or hating it. Normally this isn't a problem; but when managers hate it, simply because they are squeamish about having human tissue and lots of chemicals well out of their experience, then they try to destroy it. It's like the old saying goes: We fear what we do not understand, and upper management doesn't understand a lot of things.

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"We're not wasting another cent on this astrology bullshit. You shut that cancer studies department down!"

My biggest problem over the years was fending off MBA types, who simply wanted it gone because dealing with it all properly was a damn hassle from their point of view. (I was happy with my ice picks and lysate.) Eventually they won, and it got shut for a couple of years. Over 100,000 samples were lost. It's a crime against science when you consider the lack of banked brains across the world is stalling research into Autism, concussions, and a wide range of child developmental disabilities.

And the issue isn't acquiring brains with rare diseases. Many people with illnesses are very good at saying they'd like to donate, because people are awesome. But healthy people often don't think to donate their brains, because who would care? Well, every scientist. Because without control brains, it's impossible to tell just what's abnormal about the sick ones. Lack of control brains is a major problem for researchers worldwide.

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"He would use "YOLO" and "bae" unironically."
"Next."

And, hey, don't just sign up to donate your brain. Get all those organs on the table. Think of it this way: your liver could get a whole new lifetime of drinking after you get savaged by that brown bear you drunkenly challenged to a fight.

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"I skipped eating that so others could live. Don't be a dick."

Mark Wilson is a pseudonym, and he has a blog War, Politics and Elephants.

Robert Evans is head of Cracked's personal experience article department, and you can find more of his stuff right here.

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