FLICKR CREATIVE COMMONS, AIGARS MAHINOVS
More than 50 brains of autism patients thawed out over 3 days at the Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital, potentially setting back valuable autism research by years, the director of the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center Francine Benes told the Boston Globe. It was the “perfect storm” of failure on several fronts, she said—the external thermostat showed the wrong temperature, two separate alarms failed to sound, and the samples were unusually concentrated in one freezer.
The total collection of more than 150 autism patient brains took 2 decades to accumulate, and were instrumental in some 100 studies on the environmental and immune contributions of the disease. While more than half the damaged brains had sections preserved in formalin that were unaffected by the freezer malfunction, and some ...
