Brain Collection

Franklin Roosevelt with government posts, William Randolph Hearst with hard cash, other ambitious men with other means have been great collectors of useful living brains. Only an institution, however, can satisfactorily set itself up as a great collector of useful dead brains. Cornell University at Ithaca, N. Y. and Bekhtereff Institute at Leningrad are well-known dead-brain collectors. Last week another institution, Brain Research Institute of Georgetown University at Washington, D. C., launched itself in this elite field of collection, planning to enlarge its already considerable "library" of 5,000 brains. Anatomist Othmar Solnitzky, wiry little cosmopolite director of the Institute sent out a call to all lands and peoples for collectors' items which he may slice exceedingly thin and map at his leisure.

Besides human brains Georgetown wants the brains of all kinds of animals, birds, reptiles and fish. The U. S. Biological Survey, Bureau of Fisheries and Smithsonian Institution are contributing ordinary specimens. Anatomist Solnitzky asked hunters to supplement this with the brains of rare specimens which they kill.

Prize of the Georgetown collection so far is the brain of a sphenodon, a three-eyed lizard which lives in New Zealand. Its third eye is in the top of its head. When the Washington Zoo's arthritic elephant, Babe, died recently (TIME, Aug. 23), Anatomist Solnitzky, who keeps an empty human skull on his office desk for scientific sentiment, tried to obtain her brain. But Zoo Director William M. Mann for animal sentiment insisted that Babe, although so large she had to be buried in pieces, nonetheless should be buried in toto.

Georgetown's collection is still small but already promises to be one of the most varied. When full grown, its brains, whole and sectioned, are to give a scientist's eye view of one of the least known parts of anatomy, a view covering not mankind alone but virtually the whole field of animate evolution.

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