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I'd come that afternoon to witness what has become a rarity: the non-forensic medical autopsy. "Autopsy" means to see for oneself, and that is exactly what doctors once did. Fifty years ago we performed autopsies on roughly half of patients who died in hospitals. Today, the number of autopsies has dwindled to less than 10 percent, with next to none in nonacademic hospitals.

For the second time in four months, researchers have reported autopsy results that suggest Alzheimer's disease might occasionally be transmitted to people during certain medical treatments-although scientists say that neither set of findings is conclusive. The latest autopsies, described in the Swiss Medical Weekly on January 26, were conducted on the brains of seven people who died of the rare, brain-wasting Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). Decades before their deaths, the individuals had all received surgical grafts of dura mater-the membrane that covers the brain and spinal cord. These grafts had been prepared from human cadavers and were contaminated with the prion protein that causes CJD.