Missing Brains Found

About 100 human brains belonging to a university collection thought lost have turned up at another campus.

Written byKerry Grens
| 1 min read

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WIKIMEDIA, DRDAKDozens of human brains stored in a basement at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin had been missing for years. But recent media attention on the absent jars has helped resolve their whereabouts: UT San Antonio.

“They read a media report of the missing brains and they called to say: ‘We got those brains!’” Tim Schallert, the former curator of the Austin collection, told the Los Angeles Times.

The organs represent roughly half of a brain collection that had arrived at UT Austin a few decades ago from the Austin State Hospital. According to an excerpt from the book Malformed: Forgotten Brains of the Texas State Mental Hospital published in The Atlantic this week (December 2), the brains got shuffled around because the center where they were housed at UT Austin became too crowded. But in the mid-1990s, when Schallert went to move them, the jars were nowhere to be found. “I never found out exactly what happened—whether they were just ...

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  • kerry grens

    Kerry served as The Scientist’s news director until 2021. Before joining The Scientist in 2013, she was a stringer for Reuters Health, the senior health and science reporter at WHYY in Philadelphia, and the health and science reporter at New Hampshire Public Radio. Kerry got her start in journalism as a AAAS Mass Media fellow at KUNC in Colorado. She has a master’s in biological sciences from Stanford University and a biology degree from Loyola University Chicago.

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