Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at for further information. For NPR News, I'm Matt Largey in Austin.Ĭopyright © 2014 NPR. In the meantime, the brains have been moved out of the professor's storage closet into a set of fresh, new jars. The book is called "Malformed." They're hoping someone who knows something more about the brains might read the book and help fill in the blanks. LARGEY: Voorhees and Hannaford will publish a book of their photographs and research this week. SCHALLERT: One of the interesting things that we can do with these brains is we can look for disorders that patients that didn't have any drugs, like they do now, we can compare them and maybe some major things that we'll find about what the drugs do. However, the collection might help solve a different set of mysteries - mysteries about the brain itself. Whitman's brain disappeared from the collection - nobody knows when - and that is mystery number three. His brain stayed behind - at least for a time. De Chenar found a small tumor in Whitman's brain. LARGEY: The same Coleman de Chenar who put the collection together in the first place. And the pathologist at the time was a guy called Coleman de Chenar. And in that note he had asked that his brain be left to science and looked at by the pathologist to find out if there was something wrong with him. HANNAFORD: When Charles Whitman was shot, they found a note. LARGEY: Whitman was the University of Texas Tower shooter who killed 16 people in 1966 before he was killed by police. ![]() HANNAFORD: Among these brains is the brain of Charles Whitman, the UT shooter. So we may never know the identities behind these brains - except for one. Mystery number two - what bodies were attached to these brains? Hannaford asked the state hospital for the records, but no luck. And nobody really knows where or why they've just vanished. VOORHEES: A hundred of the brains were just gone. But here's the thing - now there's only 100 brains. Twenty-five years later, Voorhees shows up. LARGEY: So they brought over these 200 brains, put them in a closet in Professor Tim Schallert's lab. And basically, Austin Insane Asylum didn't have room for them anymore. HANNAFORD: There was 200 brains in this collection back in 1986. The brains were collected by a staff doctor there named Coleman de Chenar. LARGEY: He says the collection came from the Austin State Hospital which used to be called - without concern for offending people - the Texas State Lunatic Asylum. And what Hannaford found was.ĪLEX HANNAFORD: Basically, this brain collection was bequeathed to the University of Texas in 1986. So he called his friend, Alex Hannaford, a journalist living in Austin at the time, to help him do some research. ![]() He went back and took hundreds of photographs of them. LARGEY: After he left that day, Voorhees kept thinking about all those brains. VOORHEES: Schallert was pointing out things to us like an Alzheimer's brain, a brain with dementia. TIM SCHALLERT: Well, we have Parkinson brains. LARGEY: They were odd shapes, strange colors. VOORHEES: You know, we were kind of immediately struck by that they don't look like normal human brains. The professor has a collection of brains.ĪDAM VOORHEES: One wall is lined, floor to ceiling, two deep of these large jars filled with human brains. The brain he photographed was provided by psychology professor Tim Schallert. Scientific American Magazine assigned photographer Adam Voorhees to take pictures of a human brain. MATT LARGEY, BYLINE: It all started with a photo shoot. KUT's Matt Largey tells us about the enduring mysteries that surround the collection. For decades a collection of human remains sat in a basement at the University of Texas at Austin.
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