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The Future of the Most Important Human Brain
mattnyc99 writes "About a year ago, we watched live as neuroanatomist Jacopo Annese sliced the brain of Memento-style patient Henry Molaison (aka H.M.) into 2,401 pieces. Since even before then, writer Luke Dittrich — whose grandfather happened to be the surgeon to accidentally slice open the H.M. skull in the first place — has been tracking Annese and a new revolution in brain science. From the article in Esquire: 'If Korbinian Brodmann created the mind's Rand McNally, Jacopo Annese is creating its Google Maps. ... With his Brain Observatory, Annese is setting out to create not the world's largest but the world's most useful collection of brains. ... For the first time, we'll be able to meaningfully and easily compare large numbers of brains, perhaps finally understanding why one brain might be less empathetic or better at calculus or likelier to develop Alzheimer's than another. The Brain Observatory promises to revolutionize our understanding of how these three-pound hunks of tissue inside our skulls do what they do, which means, of course, that it promises to revolutionize our understanding of ourselves.'"
Affect
Here at the UW we harvest thousands of brains for various medical studies, and generally freeze half of the brain and slice up the other half and stain that half with various dyes, while taking electrical and other measurements within a few hours of death.
While an approach like this described in the article might be useful for things like Pick's Disease, it would pretty much prove useless for Alzheimer's Disease, since that is an age-appropriate measurement of tangles and neurolytic fibers.
Things like childhood diseases or other gross abnormalities might be interesting.
But if you want to know if you'll get Alzheimer's it has a lot more to do with the exact APOE genes you carry and your general cardiovascular health and brain injury risk factors than it does other stuff. And by the time you harvest these brains it's way too late.
And things like Parkinson's are more about mitochondrial failure to function correctly than about general brain health - it's not just your brain, it's the rest of your body too.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
No, someone's intelligence or outlook on the world is a combination of upbringing, willpower and education. Anyone could be as intelligent and knowledgeable as they wanted to be, if they wanted to be.
It has been shown than intelligence is highly heritable. Identical twins raised in different environments will almost always have nearly the same IQ. Adopted siblings have vastly different IQs.
On the other hand, it has been shown that the rich and powerful don't have better genetics or IQs than average people. The class system and inheriting wealth is what keeps them rich, not their willpower.
This is the typical argument of why the poor deserve to be poor because they choose to be stupid and have no willpower while the rich deserve to be rich because they choose to be smart and have a lot of willpower. The only problem is that it is completely false.
This illness for which H.M. is studied is one with gross pathology that should be very visible with the method used. The study of Einstein's brain did the most important thing that a scientific experiment can do: it falsified a hypothesis. Nobody really knew that Einstein did not have gross pathology until they looked. This is not to say that the person who kept Einstein's brain in a jar on his desk for his whole life had any right to do that, but preserving the brain for the imaging tools of a later generation was a good idea.
Bruce Perens.
but isn't this still a rather macro-level view of things, with the cutting process still causing damage to the fine structures they want to study?
No, the cryostat is designed to preserve things down to the subcellular level. Had they just cut it up with a scalpel, yeah, that would not preserve much. Fixing it with, say, paraformaldehyde, then freezing it and sectioning it, the sections do okay if you're skilled at it. You can see down to the neuron level.
It seems likely to me that future scientists will look back at this in not too long with stifled laugher and perhaps a little shock at the approach.
I personally am always astounded at what past scientists were able to accomplish with the tools at hand. Ramon Y Cajal, the "father of neuroscience" had primitive microscopes and a method of staining cells that sounds exhausting, but described the brain in astonishing detail. I personally doubt I could have accomplished what he did with the tools we have now. Unless future scientists are idiots, they'll likely realize that these are the best tools we have now.
My grandmother often told stories told to her by her grandfather who was in the Civil war, and yes, in the field hospitals it was pretty much "Hold him down, and get sawing" kind of deal. She said the weapons they used on the soldiers at the time also helped to crank up the barbarism, with soldiers often loading chains, nails, and anything else they could find into cannons when they ran out of shells. Sure we already knew about anesthesia, but good luck finding any in a muddy field hospital in the middle of TN with a battle going on. Troops and doctors on both sides simply didn't realize it was gonna be such a hideous war, believing it would be a "gentlemen's conflict" like the revolutionary war.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
My brain doesn't seem to be working well (I had a few beers). I thought I'd read everything he wrote, what's that from?
It's from a speech he gave at a conference which hasn't actually been published anywhere, but was captured on tape, and Richard Dawkins quoted it in his eulogy.
This is not so likely to be historically correct as one might suppose. Fact is, what they fired out of cannons back then wasn't loose powder and shot, but a single bag containing powder and a cannonball. In other words, if you don't have any cannonballs (not shells), then you've got no powder to shoot nails and chains.
Ether was used more than you might suppose in the Civil War. At least by the Union, who could afford to make the stuff and had the wherewithal to deliver it in quantity to their armies.
Anyone who believed in 1861 that the Revolutionary War was a "gentlemen's conflict" was so deluded about history that he can be excused for thinking that the Civil War was going to be one. Alas, history doesn't agree about the nature of the Revolutionary War.
Note, for reference, that the people who tended to think in terms of "gentelmen's war" were mostly Southern aristocrats. Most of the soldiers on both sides weren't able to kid themselves that standing on a battlefield with 30,000+ other people trying to kill you was going to be a friendly sort of affair.
Oddly enough, I had a great-great-grandfather in just such a situation. Battle of Franklin, in fact.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
"whose grandfather happened to be the surgeon to accidentally slice open the H.M. skull in the first place"
The surgery was no accident - it was a planned procedure that the doctors (correctly) thought would stop the epileptic seizures that H.M. was experiencing.
The eulogy, or at least some references to it (like the quote), are in The Salmon of Doubt. A worthwhile read if you haven't read it.