An independent analysis has faulted a freezer’s digital controls for the loss of 147 brain samples that defrosted earlier this year at the Harvard-affiliated Brain Tissue Resource Center at McLean Hospital.
Among those samples were the brains of 54 people who had autism – nearly a quarter of the autism brain samples available for research into a condition that now affects 1 in 88 American children. At the time researchers said the collection, which took 14 years to amass, could set autism research back perhaps as long as a decade.
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McLean's actually has a history of destroying brains, so this is nothing new.
Clearly human error. Redundancy was bypassed and there were backup systems to the system relied upon. Just goes to show that having a lot of brains does not make you smart...