​It’s Surprisingly Easy to Lose Track of 100 Brains in Jars

It's pretty easy to forget where you last put something—car keys, wallet, those hundred-or-so human brain specimens you left lying around.

That's what happened at the University of Texas, in a whirlwind mystery that is in many ways no less bizarre now it's apparently been solved.

On Tuesday, the Atlantic publis​hed a story about the strange case of the missing brains: Around 100 brains in jars had apparently disappeared from the university, their whereabouts unknown. The brains had belonged to psychiatric patients at Austin State Hospital and were given to the Animal Resources Center at the University of Texas owing to lack of space. There were around 200. Until there weren't.

About half apparently vanished inaround the 1990s, but Ars Techn​ica explains that a book documenting the remaining brains brought the issue to new attention.

Quite how the brains vanished was unclear; Tim Schallert, a neuroscientist at the university, told the Atlantic he went to move half of the collection at the request of the centre's director and they'd gone. Was it a prank? Did students steal them for novelty room deco​rations? Were they sold on eBay like a bunch of brains stolen from a museum in Indiana earlier t​his year?

To add more eeriness to the conundrum, speculation spread that one of the specimens was the brain of Charles Whi​tman, who came to be known as the "Texas Tower Sniper" after he went on a shooting spree at the university and killed 16 people. That's unconfirmed.

Wednesday morning, the University of Texas released a stat​ement to say they were "committed to treating the brain specimens with respect and are disheartened to learn that some of them may be unaccounted for."

But before Motherboard had chance to uncover a secret student smuggling ring for human specimen contraband—and after a bit of a detour in the story where it w​as thoughtanother school was in possession of the brains, only for that to later be​ denied—the university followed up with another ​statement offering a solution to the mystery. The brains were destroyed over a decade ago.

"A preliminary university investigation has revealed that UT environmental health and safety officials disposed of multiple brain specimens in approximately 2002 in accordance with protocols concerning biological waste," the university wrote.

According to their investigation, university faculty had decided the brains were not in good enough condition for teaching purposes, so they disposed of 40-60 jars—"some of which contained multiple human brains"—with the assistance of a biological waste contractor.

There are a few puzzles left: it's unknown whether Whitman's brain was in that lot, for one.

And how the brains came to be reported "misplaced" 12 years after they were destroyed raises a few questions in terms of quite how the specimens were handled.