The Brain Trust

At the end of a winding drive dotted with green hills lies McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. It is the home of the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center and some 3,000 donated human brains. Founded in 1978, the center is known as the brain bank. It supplies gray matter to labs all over the world for researchers studying everything from Alzheimer's disease to schizophrenia.

The brains arrive at the center every hour of the day and night. Their hemispheres may be quickly preserved in formalin, then cut and mounted onto slides and dyed to highlight anomalies. Other brains are freeze-dried in liquid nitrogen, stored in Tupperware or packed into freezers at -80 degrees Celsius.

PT's Jill Neimark visited psychiatrist Francine Benes, who has been director of the brain bank since 1996. The bank has recently embarked on an ambitious effort to post online all data gleaned from the brains. Genetic information from 66 anonymous subjects is now available for study.

JN: What did you feel the first time you saw a human brain?

FB: Pure awe. I was a graduate student at Creedmore State Hospital when I saw a postmortem brain being carried down the hall. I asked if I could watch them prepare it. All I could think was that about 10 minutes before, the person might have been alive. And now we were holding the organ of the body that in essence made them who they were.

Your specialty is schizophrenia. How did that lead you to the brain bank?

When I was being trained as a resident, my supervisor said the core aspect of schizophrenia is the loss of a sense of self. If you ask a schizophrenic, he will tell you he feels like a robot, or a disembodied spirit moving through space. At that time, there were breakthroughs in neuroscience demonstrating how neural circuits were organized. I realized that one day the disturbances in thinking that occur in schizophrenia would be explained by neurocircuitry.

Are we getting closer to understanding the causes of this disease?

We have some fascinating clues. For instance in bipolar disorders, genes are expressed that lead to the death of a great number of GABA cells. GABA is a very important neurotransmitter system. In bipolar brains, there are 30 percent fewer cells than normal, and in schizophrenia, only 12 to 15 percent fewer cells. We think GABA is key in both disorders, but in schizophrenia the cells are not being killed off so much as [they're] not functioning properly.

What breakthroughs do you see on the horizon?

There are going to be major breakthroughs in the next decade. I can feel it coming. We have the kind of technology that allows us to look at 30,000 genes simultaneously, and then relate them to specific pathways and get a snapshot of what's happening inside the cells. And now we are creating an interactive international database. We upload slides of the tissue onto the Web, and neuroscientists can view those slides and ask for tissue samples to study. We're going to ask them to deposit their results into this data bank. That's where the important insights are going to come, because the entire neuroscience community will be working together.

What other disorders are you studying?

We have an arrangement with the National Institutes of Health to deal with various disorders, including Huntington's disease, Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease, as well as autism, Tourette's syndrome, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The youngest brain at the bank is from an autistic child who was 7 years old. We have great sympathy for the families making the decision to donate a loved one's brain. They are helping us understand both normal and abnormal thinking.