The University of Texas, my alma mater, has a very large campus. Easy to lose stuff—like 100 jars of brains in formaldehyde.

About 200 brains, collected by Dr. Coleman de Chenar of Austin State Hospital (formerly known as: the Texas State Lunatic Asylum) from the 1950s to the mid-1980s, were gifted to the University of Texas in 1987 for research, beating out Harvard for the stash. In the intervening years, half of those brains apparently went missing. UT supposedly didn't realize until an excerpt from Alex Hannaford's forthcoming book, Malformed: Forgotten Brains of the Texas State Mental Hospital, was published on The Atlantic's website yesterday. Whoops!

Allegedly among the missing brains: Charles Whitman's, the man who climbed the campus' 307-foot tower with a rifle and shot and killed 16 people in 1966. From the Atlantic:

Whitman's, it transpires, wasn't the only brain missing from the collection. Tim Schallert, a neuroscientist at UT and the collection's curator, says that when the original brains were bequeathed to the University of Texas, there were around 200 specimens. By the mid-1990s, they were taking up much-needed shelf space at the Animal Resources Center, and Dr. Jerry Fineg, the center's then-director, asked Schallert if he would move half of the jars elsewhere.

When Schallert got around to it, he says they had vanished. He asked Fineg if he knew what had happened to them, and Schallert says Fineg told him he got rid of them. "I never found out exactly what happened—whether they were just given away, sold or whatever—but they just disappeared."

"We're moving at breakneck speed to figure this all out," UT spokesman Gary Susswein told the Houston Chronicle today. "We obviously take this very seriously."

It was briefly believed, after a Los Angeles Times report quoting a UT professor, that the brains had been found on the school system's San Antonio campus. Turns out, the Chronicle reports, the professor had just repeated "something he had been told second-hand."

Or this could have happened:

Find the brains!

Update: Well, well, well—UT says the brains were destroyed. From the San Antonio Express-News:

UT spokesman Gary Susswein said Wednesday that workers with the university's Environmental Health and Safety division disposed of the brains in 2002. The brains arrived at the university in the 1980s.

"Faculty members determined they were in poor condition and not usable for research or teaching," Susswein said.

That the university ever had Whitman's brain is also contested. "We have no evidence at this time that any of the brain specimens came from Charles Whitman, though we will continue to investigate those reports," the school said in a statement.

[Image via Shutterstock]