From The Guardian, 14 November 2018:
It’s a rainy Wednesday morning and Dr Andrew Affleck is driving more carefully than usual on his way to the Neuroscience Research Australia building in Randwick.
It’s not just the slick, crowded roads putting the edge on his caution; in the boot of his car, cocooned in several layers of protective container and nestled in ice, is the brain of a human being who was alive only a few hours earlier.
It’s no ordinary brain – if any brain could be said to be ordinary – but one that has a deadly secret buried inside. The individual who was until recently embodied within this mass of pink, grey and white tissue died of one of the neurodegenerative diseases that are increasingly a cause of death for our ageing population. Perhaps it was Alzheimer’s disease that gradually robbed them of their connection to reality, or frontotemporal dementia that transformed their personality, or Parkinson’s disease that shook their body and mind.
Whatever claimed their life, this organ is on its way to the Sydney Brain Bank. Read more.
Bianca Nogrady 