MEDICAL ETHICS  HAVEN'T CHANGED MUCH -FACCI'S MANTRA 'TRUST SCIENCE

Scottish soldier Donnie MacRae died as a German prisoner of war during World War Two - but it was not until almost 80 years later that his family discovered he had been buried without his brain.

Donnie died in a PoW hospital in 1941 and because he had suffered with a rare neurological condition an autopsy was performed on his body.

During the post-mortem, his brain and part of his spinal cord were removed and sent to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry in Munich to be used for research.

His body was buried by the Germans and later reburied by the Allies in the Commonwealth War Graves cemetery in Berlin but no-one knew his brain had been removed.

In total, about 160 small slices of Donnie's brain and spinal cord have 

been kept in the archives of the Munich research centre - 

since renamed the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry - ever since.

A BBC Radio 4 documentary - Shadow of War: A Tainted Anatomy -

 looks at why this happened and at the work being carried out to reunite 

the remains with the soldier in his grave.

Donnie MacRae grew up as a Gaelic speaker in Gairloch on the west 

coast of Scotland.

The family were music lovers, with a strong tradition of bagpiping, 

and they were all talented tailors, including Donnie.

He had plans to use hand-woven tweeds from his home village to set up 

his own tailoring business in Blair Atholl in Perthshire, where his brother 

lived and worked as a chauffeur at a local hotel.

However, in 1939, with the country on the brink of war, Donnie joined the 

Territorial Army and was called up to fight.

He was a private with the Seaforth Highlanders and was captured as a 

prisoner of war while fighting at St Valery, France, in June 1940.

He died the following year, at the age of 33, in a prisoner of war camp hospital.

Though the MacRae family knew of Donnie's capture and death, 

they were never informed about an autopsy, or about samples being 

taken from his brain.

It was only in 2020, when Prof Paul Weindling from Oxford Brookes 

University got in touch, that his niece Libby MacRae learned what had happened after Donnie's death.

Prof Weindling is part of an international group of researchers who are 

examining records of thousands of brains that were held at the

 Max Planck Society in Germany.

The aim of the project is to identify all the victims and to commemorate 

them properly.

"One overlooked group is certainly prisoners of war whose brains were 

taken for neuropathological research by the Germans and stockpiled for 

many, many years,

" Prof Weindling says.

The Germans wanted to be at the forefront of medical research and

 the reason why 

Donnie's brain ended up at the institute in Munich lies in the manner 

of his death.

When he was captured he had been wounded by a rifle bullet in the

 left knee and back.

Although the wound healed he was later readmitted to hospital where

 his condition deteriorated quickly in the following months.