For Brain Awareness Week 2022, we dropped in on five Allen Institute teams working to understand the brain. Get a glimpse into their workdays.
It’s a cold March morning in Seattle, and Windy Ho is waiting for a piece of brain.
He’s been in the lab since 7:00, preparing reagents and tools. The patient’s surgery was scheduled for 7:40, but there were delays. Finally, a small white van pulls into the loading dock in the Allen Institute garage. Michael Clark, who’s also a researcher on the tissue processing team, jumps out of the passenger seat to retrieve the van’s precious cargo.
Mo Hatsabout and Clark unload a wheeling cart from the back of a van in the loading dock of the Allen Institute on Friday, March 11, 2022. The cart contains a small cooler with a tiny piece of human brain nestled inside.
“Y’all ready?” Clark asks. In the tissue processing lab, which the team has affectionately dubbed the bat cave, Clark and Ho have unpacked the cooler from the van, which contains a bottle of clear liquid packed on ice. Floating in the liquid, a special buffer Ho made fresh that morning, is a small blob of tissue, pink and beige.
It’s a still-alive piece of a person’s brain, removed during surgery less than an hour before and donated by the patient to science. In the course of operating to remove a brain tumor, the patient’s surgeon needed to remove a small section of healthy brain to reach their disease. With the patient’s consent, this section of healthy tissue is preserved in liquid and rushed across town to the Allen Institute laboratories.
