Patient's Brain Sectioned - Historical Medical Procedure

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user098123

Active member
Copied this from another forum I am on:

Neuroscience history taking place. http://thebrainobservatory.ucsd.edu/

The brain of patient H.M. is being sectioned today, right now (there is a link for a live feed on that page).

Some of you already know this , but H.M. was

a patient who received a bilateral hippocampal removal - which resulted

in profound anterograde amnesia (similar to the man in the movie

"Memento", or Drew Barrymore in "50 first dates"), and which helped

clue everyone in on how important the hippocampus is for memory. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HM_(patient)

H.M. had been a big part of neuroscience research, as a subject

(particularly learning and memory research) since the surgery, and he

died last year. His brain is being sectioned in the lab of Jacopo

Annese, at UC San Diego

The purpose of the removal of the Bilateral Hippocampal removal was to fix the patients Epilepsy, which resulted in complete loss of the ability to change short term memory to long term memory.

Click the link, it is sureal.

Slightly NSFW, they are cutting apart an actual brain in live action.
 
Little more info:

"We are slicing the brain of the amnesic patient H.M. into giant

histological sections. The whole brain specimen has been successfully

frozen to -40C and will be sectioned during one continuous session that

we expect will last approximately 30 hours (+ some breaks and some

sleep in between). The procedure was designed for the safe collection

of all tissue slices of the brain and for the acquisition of blockface

images throughout the entire block.

The procedure will mark the completion of Phase 1 of the project

which will include ex vivo MR-imaging, blockface imaging, tissue

slicing and cryogenic storage of all histological sections"
 
I kept reading 'sectioned' as 'suctioned' and was very very confused until I finally figured it out. Interesting stuff.
 
I might say something about this to my psych teacher, we just did a chapter on the brain and its functions.
 
"we will return tomorrow at 8am PST"

Stoke. Unfortunately I'll be missing it because of my 8am o-chem lab.
 
Was H.M. the guy who would go and play tennis with the researchers every day, thinking he didn't know how to play? Eventually he got pretty good at it despite never remembering he played the day before.
 
i would assume it's the same guy, if he was learning motor memory stuff like drawing a star with the opposite hand and what not, it fits the same model
 
to me that the most intriguing part about this kind of patient, they cant form memories but they somehow can learn new skiil/games?

fantastic
 
HM died?! No shit. His case study was pretty damn interesting. Alot of brain function and and especially the significance of the hippocampus was learned from him.
 
yeah, I'm watching a bit now, but the white cube is like ice around the brain? I dont understand fully, is the guy alive or dead?
 
Person died, they are taking cross sections of the guys brain to gain a better understanding of the structure. It is being cut in 70 micron sections. The brain is frozen in to the block of ice and they are currently cutting through the frontal lobe. Once it starts it will make more sense.
 
If you wanna get technical, I'll bet its not ice, more of a low freezing level plastic-ey compound. Tissues that freeze arent great for histology, structures rupture as the freezing water expands, so most of the fluid in the tissue is exchanged through immersion baths in alcohols and sucrose mixtures.
 
True but ice doesn't technically always mean water either. Dry Ice is one example. I said ice out of habit but yes, I am sure that it isn't water. Even using a high flow coolant cycler at -40 like they are doing wouldn't be good enough for ice they would need to use something with different thermal properties.
 
they just posted a little massage saying: 'Little dry ice break, sections are looking good :)'so yeah you are right they are using dry ice.
 
I e-mailed this to my psych professor and in his reply he posed a very interesting thought:

"I wonder about the ethics about asking someone with no memory consolidation to sign a consent form to give his brain to science!"
 
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