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A screenshot with text reading: The lab depended on tissue donations from the families of war veterans who had recently died, but few families knew it existed, and the lab's bylaws barred it from cold-calling grieving families to ask. Brain tissue deteriorates quickly; by the time most families found out about the lab, it was too late. Ms. Collins's quick decision meant that her husband's brain was soon packed in ice and on its way. That single brain revealed a pattern of damage that the head of the lab, Dr. Daniel Perl, who had spent a career studying neuropathology in civilians, had never seen before. Nearly everywhere that tissues of different density or stiffness met, there was a border of scar tissue - a shoreline of damage that seemed to have been caused by the repeated crash of blast waves. It was not chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., which is found in football players and other athletes who have been repeatedly hit in the head. It was something new.