5 Horrific Things You Learn Preserving Brains for a Living

Years ago it had been an old gym used for physical therapy on injured patients. But it was built over solid concrete without a sprung floor so anyone who used it hobbled their knees. The gym fell into disrepair, and thrifty government employees piled the thing high with brain samples.

This place had been properly forgotten by the time I arrived, to the extent that just finding the keys was tricky; boxes of them were poured onto tables across many offices. When I got to the door I saw how pointless it was locking the place, as the door was almost falling apart. Some genius had put an internal door on the outside and left it unpainted against the unstoppable dampness of 20 winters in the British Isles. When I pulled the handle, it came out, and it took three years for the hospital authorities to put in a new one, which immediately fell out again since they didn't replace the door, but just screwed a new handle into the rotten frame. So I guess the whole world is lucky there were no supervillains wandering about with plans for some sort of brain-powered Cerebrocannon.

When I walked in, the smell hit me like a drunken dockworker whose sexuality and/or favorite sports team had been questioned. A sharp, decaying meaty smell with a fatty edge, coupled with an airborne level of formaldehyde so high it might as well have been teargas. I let it air out for a bit before entering to find that pigeons had made their homes in the upper reaches, brains had cracked out of their cases, and there were so many spiders you'd have thought it was Shelob's Lair.

Everyone knew it was there, unofficially, but even disposing of this level of mess was a major biohazard. I worked as a volunteer for years, but if I'd tried to work on the project officially there would've been miles of red tape to make sure it was "safe" and "efficient" and "not going to melt me from the inside out." Likely as not, they'd have just burned the lot of it to avoid the hassle. The moral of this story: never, ever ask anything.

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And then there's friggin' lysate. You know how infected blood is a high-risk substance? Even if you're not a doctor, you should have retained at least that much from the Resident Evil series. Well, the saving grace of blood is its viscosity. It puddles, and if you don't, like, lick it up or fall on it there's not many ways it can hurt you, because it's basically confined to wherever it is. Now lysate is from frozen tissue that isn't chemically fixed. So when you thaw it, the ice crystals go everywhere and then thaw into liquid on contact. Because it hasn't been treated, the donor's HIV or hepatitis or pneumococcus or whatever horrifying shit killed them all gets mixed together into a wet film that now coats your world. And did I mention rare, extinct diseases? Because this lab is full of them.

The frozen brains were kept in giant specialty -80 degrees Celsius freezers, familiar to almost every biologist in the world. And as every biologist in the world knows, they break way more often than you'd like. Inevitably, a freezer went out, and it was clean-up time. This involved pulling out the frozen trays from the freezer and sealing the tissue before it unfroze. Touching the metal shelves freezes your fingers to it in about five seconds, with full frostbite taking less than a minute. Now with latex gloves, I had just a few seconds before the cold penetrated the gloves and freeze-burnt my hands. (At that extreme of temperature your body can't tell between hot and cold, so it felt like fire. Except flesh rarely sticks to fire.) Of course, the possibly-diseased lysate I mentioned liquidized immediately and ran down my arms and body, even though the safety coat. It took two full days to clear the whole thing. I stank like death on the way home, the gases and large fat-and-protein-derived molecules adhere to almost anything with great stubbornness due to their charge, and anyone who's been around death knows the distinct odor profile it leaves. The Distinct Odor Profile of Death.

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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.

We also have special knives for cutting up brains. Yes, brain knives are a thing. They aren't dissimilar to serrated cooking knives, but are about a foot long and come in sets. Most professional neuropathologists (who have a budget) use chainmail gloves under their normal latex ones to avoid taking a finger off. So to answer your next question: Yes, that's probably who's keeping that weird sword-and-armor store you find at every mall in business.

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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?

Oh, and the fetid half-century brain rot smoothie was pretty bad, too.

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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.

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.

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.

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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