Brain Banks for Autism

Brain tissue from individuals with autism is rare, to say the least: of the 30,000 samples in the National Institutes of Healthʼs Brain and Tissue Bank for Developmental Disorders, for instance, only 30 are from individuals diagnosed with autism.The tissue bank has sent samples to 45 researchers thus far including, notably, Eric Courchesne. But according to Ronald Zielke, who has directed the bank since its creation in 1991, up to 20% of the tissues they distribute are used in some kind of research on autism.Here, at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting, Zielke explains to Virginia Hughes how brain banks collect samples for autism research, and how they make the difficult decisions to distribute them for research.Read more at...SFARI, November 2008.