Slashdot Mirror
More Brains Needed
Hugh Pickens writes "BBC reports that more people need to donate their brains to medical research if cures for diseases like dementia are to be found and are urging healthy people as well as those with brain disorders to become donors. 'For autism, we only have maybe 15 or 20 brains that have been donated that we can do our research on. That is drastically awful,' said Dr Payam Rezaie of the Neuropathology Research Laboratory at the Open University. 'We would need at least 100 cases to get meaningful data. A lot of research is being hindered by this restriction.' Part of the problem, according to Professor Margaret Esiri at the University of Oxford, may be that people are reluctant to donate their brains because they see the organ as the basis of their identity. 'It used to be other parts of the body that we thought were important,' says Esin. 'But now people realize that their brain is the crucial thing that gives them their mind and their self.' Dr Kieran Breen, of the Parkinson's Disease Society, said over 90% of the brains in their bank at Imperial College London were from patients, with the remaining 10% of 'healthy' brains donated by friends or relatives of patients. 'Some people are under the impression that if they sign up for a donor card that will include donating their brain for research. But it won't,' says Breen. 'Donor cards are about donating organs for transplant, not for medical science.'"
I'll only donote my brain if it's smashed up with a hammer first - or some L33t h4ck3r5 might steal my secrets and credit card numbers!
Heh :o) In all seriousness, I've actually already filled in the forms to donate my brain to the MRC London Brain Bank for Neurodegenerative Diseases.
It's not like it's going to be much to use to me. Just hoping they'll still be around, since I'm hoping it'll still be some way off.
I have a PhD and autism, so that makes me autistic but not stupid. Simon Baron-Cohen, a autism researcher, has expressed his worry that "curing" autism could reduce the number people studying maths and other professions that require good systematizing ability, a strength possessed by people with autism. Here is his comment on the BBC website...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7736196.stm
I agree that the way to discourage curing autism, at least getting people to consider its wider implications that go beyond autism, is to connect the search into a cure with the search for genes that code for personality traits.
It is known that people with Autism and Asperger's are far more likely to vote in certain political directions and express a different degree of religiosity, so we are looking at personalty traits - of all people not just autistic people - when we look for a cure. It is scary stuff, the general public does not understand the ethics or its wider implications.
I think there is a simple solution. If you don't have an organ donor card then you don't get any organs either if you need them.