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Journalism of Courage
LONDON, AUG 2: The brain of Dame Iris Murdoch, the much-admired British novelist and philosopher who died of Alzheimer’s disease in February, has been preserved and will be used for medical research, her husband has said.
John Bayley, a former English Literature professor at Oxford University who has written a book about the deterioration of his wife’s brilliant mind, said on Sunday he always wanted her body to be used for medical science.
The brain was removed before Murdoch, 79, was cremated. It is preserved in formalin at Addenbrooke Hospital in Cambridge, and will be used for research there and at the Radcliffe Infirmary in nearby Oxford where she was treated.
“One just hopes they will find a way of coping with Alzheimer’s,” said Bayley, 74.
Robin Jacoby, a leading researcher into Alzheimer’s disease at the Radcliffe, said microscope slides will be made from the brain tissue. “We will be looking at the different cells and looking for the lesions of Alzheimer’s disease, and correlating them with different psychological deficits that were found in life,” Jacoby told London’s Sunday Telegraph newspaper.
“I think the advances in Alzheimer’s disease will come from drugs that will stop the lesions forming,” he added. Murdoch’s 26 novels include A Severed Head, published in 1961 and The Sea, The Sea in 1978 which won Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize. Her last novel, Jackson’s Dilemma was published in 1995.
