The brain of famous amnesiac patient H.M. is currently being sliced into 3,000 giant histological sections to be mounted and stained on glass plates. The entire process is being broadcast live at "The Brain Observatory", a site hosted by UC San Diego.
Doctors at UCSD are performing a massive 30-hour microtome session in order to section the entire brain. The brain has been frozen into a gelatin medium for the process as opposed to embedded in paraffin.
H.M. was an amnesiac patient who developed severe anterograde amnesia at the age of 16, after a surgery intended to cure his lifelong epilepsy. This meant he was incapable of forming new long-term memories, though he retained the ability to learn certain types of new information and skills. The study of his condition helped develop a number of theories in the field of cognitive neuropsychology, a branch of psychology that aims to correlate physical structures of the brain to psychological functions.
Since his death on December 2nd, his brain has been scanned and studied in the hopes of gleaning more clues about the origin of his condition, and the more precise determination of the function of specific brain structures. The sectioning into histological plates marks the end of “Phase 2” of the study of H.M.’s brain.
The plates will be stained and prepared in a specially developed staining rack that can hold 50 of the giant plates simultaneously. That’s one batch down, 600 to go!
The brain of famous amnesiac patient 
