A tinny buzzing sound echoed through a third-floor laboratory of a building on North Wolfe Street. Perched on a stool, Dr. Thomas Hyde held an electric dental drill — the instrument he and his colleagues have found works the best for delicately extracting tissue samples.
Another researcher handed him a dull pink slice of someone’s brain about the size and shape of a chicken cutlet. He used the drill to remove a tiny piece of the caudate nucleus — a seashell-shaped structure deep in the brain that plays a critical role in many higher neurological functions. Floors below, in the basement of the shiny office tower owned by the Johns Hopkins University, thousands more brains — more than 4,300 in total — are stored at temperatures 80 degrees below freezing.
Without question, it is the largest collection in the world of postmortem brains devoted to the study of neuropsychiatric disorders. This is the Lieber Institute for Brain Development, a nonprofit research organization affiliated with the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. It was founded in 2010 by the parents of children with schizophrenia.
Through intense study of how the genes a person inherits from their ancestors determine the way their brain is built — and how that architecture may later degrade — scientists hope to develop new treatments and therapies for people living with these disorders. But there’s a major weakness in the data available to study genetic disorders: Even though people of Europ.