http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/health/autism-research-hindered-by-scarcity-of-brain-samples.html?ref=science
Paramedics tried to revive the young woman, then rushed her to the
hospital, and somewhere in that firestorm of activity and grief, the
Trues, Jane and her husband, Jim, considered donation. “I thought of it
as a gift, her brain,” she said. “To my mind, the idea that scientists
would be learning from her for years to come — how can you put a price
on that?”
The malfunction reduced by a third Harvard’s frozen autism collection,
the world’s largest. A bank maintained by the University of Maryland has
52, and there are smaller collections elsewhere. Altogether there are
precious few, given escalating research demands. The loss at the Harvard
Brain Tissue Resource Center makes donations from parents like the
Trues only more urgent.
In an average year, the Maryland bank obtains four to eight viable
donations, said Dr. Zielke. The Autism Speaks project has obtained an
average of fewer than 10 new specimens a year, said Dr. Eric London, who
founded the program and leads autism treatment research at the New York
State Institute for Basic Research. “When we first stared doing this,
we were very squeamish about it,” Dr. London said. “We didn’t want to
scare parents away.”
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