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From these facts, John Mann, an Australian-born psychiatrist with a doctorate in neurochemistry, made a leap.
依據這些事實，擁有神經生化學博士學位的澳大利亞精神病學家約翰·曼恩實現了一個飛躍。
If suicide has many causes, he hypothesized, then all suicidal brains might have certain characteristics in common.
他假設，如果自殺由很多原因引起，那么所有出現自殺傾向者的大腦都可能具有某些共同特征。
He's since done some of the most high-profile work to illuminate what researchers call the biology of suicide.
此后，他做了一些最引人注目的研究，用以闡明研究人員所謂的自殺生物學。
The phrase itself represents a bold idea—that there's an underlying physiological susceptibility to suicide, apart from depression or another psychiatric disorder.
這種叫法本身代表了一種大膽的想法，即除了抑郁癥或其他精神疾病外，還有潛在的自殺生理易感性。
Mann moved to New York in 1978, and in 1982, at Cornell University, he started collecting the brains of people who'd killed themselves.
曼恩于1978年搬到紐約，1982年在康奈爾大學期間，他開始收集那些自殺者的大腦。
He recruited Victoria Arango, now a leading expert in the field of suicide biology. The practice of studying postmortem brain tissue had largely fallen out of favor, and Mann wanted to reboot it.
他招募了維多利亞·阿蘭戈，她現在是自殺生物學領域的權威專家。用死后的大腦組織進行研究的做法已經逐漸淡出人們的視線，而曼恩想重新采用這種方法。
"He was very proud to take me to the freezer," Arango says of the day Mann introduced her to the brain collection, which then numbered about 15.
阿蘭戈在談到曼恩向她介紹收集大腦的那一天時說：“他很自豪地帶我去冷凍室。”當時收藏的大腦大約有15個。
"I said, 'What am I supposed to do with this?'" They took the work, and the brains, first to the University of Pittsburgh, and then, in 1994, to Columbia.
“我說，‘我該怎么處理呢？’”他們先是把這些大腦帶到匹茲堡大學，讓那里的研究人員開展研究工作。后來在1994年，又把它們帶到哥倫比亞大學。
They've now amassed a collection of some 1,000 human brains—some from suicide victims, the others, control brains—filed neatly in freezers kept at –112F.
現在，他們已經收集了大約1000個人腦，其中一些來自自殺受害者，另一些是控制組的大腦，它們都整齊地排列在-112華氏度的冰柜里。
The small Balkan country of Macedonia contributes the newest brains, thanks to a Columbia faculty member from there who helped arrange it.
位于巴爾干半島的小國馬其頓提供了最新的大腦，這要歸功于哥倫比亞大學的一位教員，他幫助安排了這項工作。
The Macedonian brains are frozen immediately after being removed and flown in trunks, chaperoned, some 4,700 miles to end up in shoebox-size, QR-coded black boxes.
這些馬其頓人的大腦從身體中取出后，立即進行冷凍，隨后放入行李箱中，由專人乘飛機運送約4700英里，最終放入鞋盒大小、帶有二維碼的黑匣子中。
Inside are dissected sections of pink tissue in plastic bags notated with markers: right side, left side, date of collection.
里面是用塑料袋裝好的剖開的粉紅色組織切片，標記有：右側、左側、收集日期。
In the early 1990s, Mann and Arango discovered that depressed patients who killed themselves have subtle alterations in serotonin in certain regions of the brain.
20世紀90年代初，曼恩和阿蘭戈發現在自殺的抑郁癥患者中，其大腦某些區域的血清素存在細微變化。
Mann remembers sitting with Arango and neurophysiologist Mark Underwood, her husband and longtime research partner, and analyzing the parts of the brain affected by the deficit.
曼恩記得和阿蘭戈以及她的丈夫，也是他的長期研究伙伴，神經生理學家馬克·安德伍德坐在一起，分析大腦中受缺損影響的部分。
They struggled to make sense of it, until it dawned on them that these were the same brain regions described in a famous psychiatric case study.
他們絞盡腦汁想弄明白這一點，后來他們意識到這個腦區曾在一個著名的精神病個案研究中描述過。
