From: The Paradox of Brain Death, by Pauline W. Chen
While normal brain tissue is firm, a brain that has been dead shows progressive autolysis, a form of biological self-destruction. “It will almost be like soup,” Dr. Harry Vinters, chief of neuropathology at UCLA, recently explained to me. He is the co-author of a major textbook on the pathology of the brain and has performed almost a hundred autopsies on the brain-dead. “It really depends on how long they have been on the ventilator. If they have been on the ventilator for two days, then the brain is grey and softened. But if, for example, a family has had difficulty deciding what they want to do and the patient has been kept on the ventilator for two to three weeks, then there’s tremendous autolysis. The brain gets very swollen, soft, and mushy.” The nerve tissue can become so friable that fragments of brain from the head will break off and float down the spinal column. “Sometimes I’ll be looking at a slide of the spinal cord,” says Vinters, “and I’ll see fragments of cerebellum floating around in the specimen.”
