back to article SCIENCE LAB TERROR: MYSTERY of the MISSING BRAINS

It's an embarrassing situation that's happened to most students after too much snakebite and black. One minute you're in the pub with mates, the next you find yourself idiotically clutching onto a stolen traffic cone or, you know ... a jar of brains. At least that's what professors at the University of Texas long assumed had …

  1. frank ly

    Zombies?

    That would have been my immediate line of inquiry.

    Edit: Mark, check out those 'environmental workers', I wonder how they might have disposed of the brains.

    1. Crisp

      Re: Brains?

      Brains.... brains? Eurghhhh,,,,, Brains.

      1. ravenviz Silver badge
        Trollface

        Re: Students?

        Students.... students? Eurghhhh,,,,, Students.

  2. Mark 85

    So there's no way zombies could have taken them as "canned food for later"?

    Edit: Looks like Frank beat me to the punch line. Rats!

  3. Allan George Dyer
    Pirate

    Don't loose your head

    Jeremy's head was never on display, it was damaged in the embalming process and is kept in a wooden box, at one time at his feet. The visible head is a wax copy.

    Whether Jeremy's head was ever stolen by King's is uncertain, the students tended to target the mascots, which, for UCL, was a Scottish Highlander figure taken from a tobacconist's shop on Tottenham Court Road.

    I'm particularly fond of the story that Jeremy's head is still taken to Council meetings, where he is recorded as "present, but not voting".

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: Don't loose your head

      "Whether Jeremy's head was ever stolen by King's is uncertain"

      It would be surprising if it wasn't. The Godless of Gower Street have always been the number one enemy.

      1. Allan George Dyer
        Trollface

        Re: Don't loose your head

        @Doctor Syntax - It would be surprising if it was, though I don't doubt it was tried. King's is nothing more than an annoyance to UCL. How's Reggie?

    2. Jan 0 Silver badge

      Re: Don't loose your head

      >"the students tended to target the mascots"

      I remember mascot raids in the 1960s: The dinosaur at Brunel, the micrometer at Imperial. Does this still happen nowadays?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Don't loose your head

        > Does this still happen nowadays?

        Do students still pull pranks? Perhaps you should ask the Duke of Wellington about his very fine hat...

    3. Kubla Cant
      Headmaster

      Re: Don't loose your head

      Bentham may have lost his head, but even without it I expect he knew the difference between "lose" and "loose".

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Devil

    Getting stuffed ...

    ... the 18th century utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham had his body stuffed...

    I'd like to do that to most of the House of Commons.

    1. Chris G

      Re: Getting stuffed ...

      But at the House of Commons there would be no brains to exhibit.

      1. David Pollard
        Coat

        Re: Getting stuffed ...

        That's why they call them empty headed.

    2. ravenviz Silver badge

      Re: Getting stuffed ...

      I'd like to do that to most of the House of Commons

      Is that because the House of Lords has already been done?

  5. Neil Barnes Silver badge

    Kudos

    for the Young Frankenstein sub-head.

    1. jai

      Re: Kudos

      thank you!! i was wracking my brain (no pun intended) trying to think where that quote is from

  6. 0laf

    When I was at uni there were many urban legends of cadavers being taken on pub crawls by medical students. More realistically were the stores of minor body parts like toes being dropped into people pints and fat being picked out the bodies and flicked at each other in dissection labs.

    1. The last doughnut
      Pint

      Friday pint

      Thanks for that I had a well needed chuckle. Thumbs up and a Friday pint for you.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Some friends were working in a lab researching corona virii. The lab had a rack of test tubes containing neatly removed mouse brains. I soo wanted to replace the lables with politician's names.

  7. DNTP

    Lab sample pranks

    This is the story of Crazy Eric, from twenty years ago. At the end of my third year in high school, one of our favorite bio teachers ever was retiring after teaching there forever, and the room needed to be cleaned out. So my friends and I, including Crazy Eric, decided to volunteer to help after class. One of the many strange and ancient artifacts we unearthed was a large glass jar of formaldehyde with a perfectly preserved octopus inside it. Crazy Eric grabs it and starts trying to pry it open, when the teacher notices him and says "What the HELL are you doing?". Crazy Eric looks up and says, absolutely deadpan seriously (and he WAS serious, seriously crazy) "I'm gonna F*** THIS OCTOPUS".

  8. Mike Flugennock
    Coat

    Texas

    ...but hey, it was in Texas, so who cares?

  9. disgruntled yank

    hmm

    A researcher I knew from the US National Institutes of Health was said to have lost a dozen or so male organs being shipped to her from Asia. I think that they were frozen, but it has been quite a while since I heard the story. And I never heard what the actual recipients thought when they found that package on the porch.

    1. Lotaresco
      Boffin

      Re: hmm

      "A researcher I knew from the US National Institutes of Health was said to have lost a dozen or so male organs being shipped to her from Asia. I think that they were frozen, but it has been quite a while since I heard the story."

      It seems unlikely. When I worked in medical research we used to receive body parts and blood samples from around the world, frozen and packed in dry ice. The containers tend to have a large ratio of dry ice to sample hence they are the size of picnic cool box (they often are picnic coolboxes), so losing one is a bit difficult to start with. Going back to the 1980s airlines have been notoriously reluctant to ship dry ice anywhere and often insist that the containers are accompanied by a human being which again reduces the chance of them going astray.

  10. Conundrum1885
    Joke

    Re. Hmm

    The recipient wouldn't have been Lorena Bobbitt by any chance?

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