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Brain of Patient H.M. Being Sliced, Streamed Live
buswolley writes "The slicing of the brain of the famous amnesic patient H.M. into giant histological sections is now in full swing, and is being streamed live. The brain specimen is frozen and sectioned whole during one continuous session that is expected to last approximately 30 hours."
For those of you unaware, HM had essentially complete loss of long term memory, but a normal short term/working memory and, curiously the ability to commit long term learning to his motor memory. So, he could learn new motor skills (an example would be juggling, but I do not know if HM learned that particular task), but not high-level memories.
If you're interested in more, then try reading the excellent book: "The man who mistook his wife for his hat".
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I am a pathology resident who has done about ten autopsies and from my limited experience I can say that this practice is absolutely necessary. The reasoning behind sectioning the brain is to obtain tissue for histologic examination (i.e. under a microscope). This is done to correlate clinical or radiologic findings with actual disease processes. A simple example would be a case of a small brain hemorrhage, where the radiologist thinks he/she sees some bleeding in a certain area of the brain. On autopsy, we can slice up the brain, take sections to be processed and placed on a glass slide, and actually look at the brain microscopically to confirm that there was indeed hemorrhage in the area of brain suspected by the radiologist. Also, brain sectioning/microscopic evaluation can reveal lesions or abnormalities that are not visible to the radiologist (i.e. early Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, etc.)