December 2, 2009 12:45 PM
Watch it live: dissection of famous brain
Ewen Callaway, reporter

In what must certainly be the world's first live, webcast brain dissection, scientists today will cut exceedingly thin sections of a human brain that fundamentally changed our understanding of memory.

Henry Gustav Molaison - known as H. M. - lost much of a brain structure called the hippocampus during an operation in the 1950s.

The procedure was meant to stop his epileptic seizures. However, the hippocampus is critical to memory formation, so the surgery left Molaison unable to form new long-term memories.
The researchers who studied H. M. while he was still alive revolutionised neuroscience, by showing that the hippocampus was important for making some types of memories, but not others. H. M. could not remember day-to-day events, but he could learn new skills.

Now, following H. M.'s death due to respiratory failure in 2008, scientists aim to get a much closer look at Molaison's brain. That's where the live dissection comes in.

"The extraordinary value of H. M.'s brain is that we have roughly 50 years of behavioral data, including measures of different kinds of memory as well as other cognitive functions and even sensory and motor functions," Suzanne Corkin, a neuroscientist at MIT who is involved in the project, told The San Diego Union Tribune.

"We know what he was able to do and not do. Our goal is to link his deficits to damaged brain areas and his preserved functions to spared areas."

Watch the dissection live.