There is a Danish university called Syddansk Universitet which boasts an eccentric collection of nearly 10,000 brains preserved in formaldehyde. In all, there are 9,479 organs from patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, dementia, major depressive disorder, among other conditions.
Preserved in formalin in large white buckets labeled with numbers, the collection was the life’s work of Danish psychiatrist Erik Stromgren. It was started in 1945 as a “kind of experimental research, under the premise of discovering where mental illnesses were located”.
But there is a controversy in this: the brains were collected after autopsies performed on the bodies of people admitted to psychiatric institutes across the country, without the consent of the person in question or even their family members. At the time, patients’ rights were not a concern.
The evolution of procedures post-mortem and growing awareness of patients’ rights heralded the end of new additions to the collection in 1982, and over the years, there was debate about what should be done. The local ethics board decided that it should be preserved and used for scientific research.
As the university points out on its website, the collection contains the brains of people who have never received any modern medical treatment. By studying these brains, researchers are able to investigate the effect of modern treatment.
“Many scientific studies only require tissues from a few individuals or groups of 10 to 20 individuals. However, when selecting subjects, psychiatric diagnoses, as well as factors such as sex, age, disease course, treatment and comorbidities must be taken into account . Thus, sampling cases from a large set of subjects is beneficial, especially when corresponding groups are needed for comparison”, argues the university.
The page about the nearly 10,000-brain collection even says that “only a few brains to choose from are often a limiting factor in research. Therefore, the sheer number of brains in the collection is important—even if only tissues from a relatively few are examined.”
Source: SDU, Science Alert
