On the second basement floor of the Babies and Children’s Hospital of New York- Presbyterian, the New-York Brain Bank stores 1,500,000 samples of cells that come out of almost 500 postmortem human brains. The Bank was established in 2001, to meet with the needs of neuroscientists investigating specific psychiatric and neurological disorders like Alzheimer disease, Huntington disease, or Parkinson disease.
To understand the molecular process of those diseases that impinge on human memory, some researchers decide to study human cells instead of working with animals or brain imagery. They look at cells in two-tenths of an inch thin sort of salami-slices-like pieces of human brains. Once under their microscope, the cells stay “alive” for about eight hours from the time the sample gets unfrozen, after which they can’t exploit the sample anymore.
A simple online request will give the researchers an open access to this supermarket of human brain cells. They would need to answer a set of 20 questions about their work, and within 5-working days their request is treated and the samples shipped to their labs. The New-York Brain Bank collaborates with labs in Italy, Poland, Australia, and Japan as well as with in-house labs.
In the refrigerated room, the samples get stored by tracking numbers in seven huge freezers at -112°F. To keep the cells intact, the neuropathologists in charge of the dissection work meticulously.
Listen to Mancevska explaining how they operate.
