Unlocking one of many nondescript doors in a long hallway at the Croatian Institute for Brain Research, neuroscientist Miloš Judaš switches on the lights and steps aside. "Here it is," he says. The cavernous room is filled with row after row of floor-to-ceiling shelves, nearly all of them crammed with glass jars or plastic buckets. Judaš points to one jar, where a black spot mars a bone-white brain not much larger than a plum. "Lesion," he says. "Typical in premature birth, but those babies tend to survive now."
The Zagreb Neuroembryological Collection and Brain Tissue Bank contains 1,160 human brains ranging from the fifth week after conception to 91 years of age, plus 130,000 stained histologic slides or sections, some fixed and others frozen. Ivica Kostović, director of the Croatian Institute for Brain Research (CIBR), began accumulating normal and pathologic specimens in 1974, after his return from Johns Hopkins University. ...
