Psyche Project, 2017
300 brains per year. This was the offer that prompted the German neurobiologist Christofried Jakob to migrate to the distant land of Argentina at the turn of the 20th century.
Domingo Cabred, one of the founders of modern Argentine psychiatry, considered that without the assistance of a foreign specialist in neuroanatomy, the field was doomed to stagnation. Thus, he sought out Jakob and tempted him to relocate to Buenos Aires with the tantalizing proposal of performing 300 necropsies per year.
In his native Germany, he could at best get his hand on two or three brains in the same period of time, so Cabred’s invitation must have been astonishing. After all, Jakob dedicated almost all of his life to the dissection of thousands upon thousands of brains, whose inner workings, he believed, contained the secret to human and animal activity; in a kind of cosmic synecdoche, he expected them to reveal to him the underlying laws that governed the entire universe.
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