British researchers short of brains - January 07, 2009
Like the cast of a cheap zombie movie, British scientists want your braaaaaaains.
At a press conference in London, researchers said a lack of healthy and diseased brains was holding back work on Alzheimer's, autism and other conditions.
“There’s a great opportunity to facilitate important research to discover cures and treatments which would go unfulfilled if we don't increase the number of brains available for research,” Paul Francis, from King’s College London (Daily Telegraph).
Payam Rezaie, of the Neuropathology Research Laboratory at the Open University, says the situation is dire (BBC):
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. We would need at least 100 cases to get meaningful data. But that is just one example. A lot of research is being hindered by this restriction.
Only the Guardian seems to have noticed that a special “telephone helpline” will be set up to help people donate their brains to science. Always willing to lead by example, I will be offering up my brain to journalism researchers, provided that the helpline doesn’t have one of those awful systems which asks you to, “Press one to donate your brain to a chemist, press two to donate your brain to a biologist, press three to donate your brain to a medical researcher.”
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Nature's Kerri Smith visited a brain bank at UCL for last month’s NeuroPod.
Image: Getty
