Hi everyone, I'm the girl that works at the brain observatory that ddemchuk mentioned. I just wanted to say that it's really amazing to see so many people interested in our project, so thank you! Also, I thought you might be interested in a rough overview of the process. As was already mentioned, we've been preparing HM's brain since Feb in order to be able to freeze it without actually damaging any of the tissue. We embedded the brain in a block of gelatin to ease the cutting process, and we froze the block yesterday. The sections do wrinkle up on the microtome, but both the gelatin and the fact that we cut at a very low temperature (-40C) allow us to maintain the structural integrity of the tissue (and yes, we do use a paintbrush to retrieve the sections). Hope that cleared some stuff up! Thanks again for watching!
This isn't just any brain, it's HM's brain[1], who possibly contributed more to neuroscience than any other single patient.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HM_(patient)" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HM_(patient)</a>
It's going on now and for the next ~50 hours. The brain belongs to H.M., the guy that the movie Memento is 'based on'. When he was alive, he could not create new short-term memories. He's been the subject of study for years until he passed in 2008.<p>Watching this is a bit weird, it's reminiscent of a deli meat slicer.
More about HM, whose brain it is:
<a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/0407/02-cork.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/0407/02-cork.html</a><p>You can watch a ten-minute video feature at the site below:
<a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/video/0407/i02.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/video/0407/i02.html</a><p>Note that within the first few minutes of that video, they show the brain already sliced up, and speak about it in the past tense; there's also a cut-and-died slice in a photo of the already-dissected brain on the first link...<p>I first watched that feature a few months ago, and from what I could gather, the episode was originally aired on 2009 August 25; anybody know what gives?
I'm sure they know what they are doing but the way that the slice is extracted after each pass seems really problematic to me. It looks like the slice "bunches up" and they extract it manually with some kind of blunt instrument. Wouldn't that result in a lot of unintended tearing and deforming of the slice? Perhaps someone who has used a microtome before can explain.
This is one of those things that I never thought the internet would bring you: Real time slicing of a brain. Crazy. It's amazing to think of where we will be in another 10-30 years.
My girlfriend lives with a girl who works at that lab and is probably working on that brain right now. She's explained a lot of the process to me, it's pretty fascinating stuff. I think they save every 10 slices or so, and the brain has been being prepared for like 6 months so as to allow for them to do the slicing like they do. They then go on to create the slides that will be digitally archived for other labs to study.