Most of the human brains missing from a University of Texas collection were disposed of years ago because faculty members determined that their poor condition rendered them unsuitable for research or teaching, the university said Wednesday.
The announcement by the university does not fully resolve the mystery of what happened to roughly half of a 200-brain collection that was transferred to the campus from the Austin State Hospital under a 1986 agreement. A pathologist at the mental hospital extracted the brains during autopsies of deceased patients dating back to the 1950s.
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