READ MORE: "Bob Moore's brain lay on a white plastic cutting board.
There was something beautiful about its convoluted hills and valleys, the way rivers of dusky purple and red meandered through the beige flesh.
And mysterious. Here was the essence of a man who had gone to Yale, loved a woman, fathered six children, relished ice cream and Mozart and Kierkegaard and e.e. cummings, favored questions over answers and change over complacency, hated camping, loathed golf, and, over the last 20 years, had slowly lost the capacity to understand any of it.
He had died that morning in a Wilmington, Del., nursing home, years past being able to feed himself or walk or recognize the woman he had married 56 years before.
What had gone wrong with his brain?
Before neuropathologist Mark Forman lifted his knife last December in a basement autopsy suite at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, he could see that Bob Moore's brain wasn't normal. But it would be weeks before he could tell Moore's family what had made the man they loved disappear long before his heart stopped beating."