ED RHEE Neurobiology professor Arnold
Scheibel leads a public brain dissection at the Center for
Health Sciences on Wednesday.
By Jessica Chung
Daily Bruin Contributor
The potent smell of formalin went unnoticed as undergraduate
students sat in rapt attention, watching the demonstrator slice a
human brain in two.
Wednesday’s dissection was organized by the Neuroscience
Undergraduate Society to increase interest about the brain and its
functions among students.
“The most important reason for studying the brain is that
the brain is you, and you are the brain,” said neurobiology
and psychiatry professor Arnold Scheibel, who performed the
dissection for the second year in a row for the NUS.
“If you need a heart, a lung or a kidney transplant,
you’ll still be you. But if you have a brain transplant, you
may look like yourself, but you’ll be someone completely
different,” he continued.
NUS president Viorela Pop, a fourth-year neuroscience student,
said the demonstration was a good introduction to neuroanatomy for
students before they take the course. She said that NUS hopes to
make the demonstration an annual event.
About 15 students attended the demonstration at the Center for
Health Sciences this year. Those sitting farther away from Scheibel
in the room were able to see details of the dissection on two
mounted television monitors in the front of the room.
Scheibel used three brains for his demonstrations and showed how
they were different, which ones had brain diseases and the
differences between male and female brains.
At the end of the demonstration, students were invited to touch
the dissected brains. Some said the brain felt like wet clay or
slimy Playdough.
“If people leave with one thing from this demonstration, I
want it to be respect, awe and affection for this organ, because
the brain is a part of us,” Scheibel said. “When we
think of the body, people think about the heart, the lungs, the
kidneys; we rarely think of that organ inside our skull.”
Even students not majoring in neuroscience attended the
demonstration.
“In physical science, we see things in the body on a
larger scale, but the brain is so minute … it was fascinating to
see how something so small can be so important,” said
fourth-year physiological science student Ashley Eidmann.
The brains used in the dissection were donated by people who had
willed their bodies to science through the Willed Body Program,
said Philip Klein, laboratory coordinator of the neurobiology
department in the UCLA School of Medicine. The dissected brains are
returned to the program to be disposed of properly, Klein said.