Behold, the Human Brain: Touring a Brain Bank

My visit to the brain bank located on my psychiatric hospital's campus and what I learned there. ALERT: Real brain photos ahead

I was asked to speak about my experience with bipolar disorder and generalized anxiety disorder to a group of nursing students at the psychiatric hospital I work for last week. They were wonderful and had fantastic questions.

As a “by the way,” the clinical instructor asked if I wanted to join the nursing students on a tour of a brain bank on our hospital’s campus afterward, in a research building kept under tighter lock and key than mine, HIPAA notwithstanding. I said yes because it sounded cool as hell, and I say yes to nearly everything.

Our group arrived to a locked door and rang the doorbell, chattering in anticipation. The nursing students were especially excited, given science is their field.

I’ve often lied to myself that I could transition to nursing if my other ventures failed because I’m CoMpAsSiOnAte. Let’s forget the fact that I have a mild case of mysophobia, aka germophobia, a pathological fear of contamination and germs. I hate bodily fluids and shrink into myself when someone coughs or sneezes near me. Early 2020 was hell for me and while I’ve been exposed to more things at the hospital and have adapted to how blasé our nurses are about COVID, a coworker once asked me if I was going to leave any hand sanitizer for the rest of us.

At the research building, we were met at the door by two young women in white lab coats who welcomed us to the brain bank. We went up an elevator that, I shit you not, had a bridge that connected us to our destination. I felt like I was in a spy movie.

They opened the door and showed us a room where we could place our coats. It looked highly academic. Cream-colored walls, posters showing different types of brains, and large, silver biohazard bins.

“Welcome to the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center, aka the Brain Bank,” one worker with pulled back braids said. “We are a centralized resource for the collection and distribution of human brain specimens for brain research. The Brain Bank collects brain and tissue samples from across the United States and distributes them to investigators all over the world. This is all made possible via donations made by individuals and their loved ones who help carry out their last wishes. This process has to take place within 24 hours of the person’s death, and there are people throughout the country that can facilitate this if it is in the person’s wishes.

“We receive funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and are very grateful to our donors who make it possible to study brain disorders. We need various donors to conduct research. We receive many donations of brains with physical disorders like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and Huntington’s diseases, but we don’t receive as many donations from people with mental health disorders like bipolar and schizophrenia, perhaps due to the stigma people with those disorders still experience. We also need more donations of perfectly healthy brains to serve as controls in studies.”

The other woman in a lab coat with long, curly brown hair stepped up to speak. “So, we’re going to see a few brains today. Sometimes we don’t know how we’re going to react to seeing an actual human brain, so we encourage you to please take care of yourself. Please feel free to step out of the room if you need to, and do whatever is best for you.” She paused. “Also, we have a unique situation happening in the lab today that not everyone gets to see. Right now, there is a worker who is in the process of slicing a brain. We typically save one half of the brain and leave it intact. The other half of the brain is sliced into pieces so more people around the world can study it.”

Okay, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool.