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The Netherlands Brain Bank (NBB) performs rapid autopsies of donors who gave written informed consent during life for the use of their brain tissue and medical files for research. The NBB initiated the Netherlands Brain Bank for Psychiatry (NBB-Psy), a prospective donor program for psychiatric diseases. NBB-Psy wants to expand the tissue collections in order to provide a strong incentive to increase research in psychiatry. The ultimate goal of NBB-Psy is to reduce the burden of psychiatric disorders for patients, their families, and for society as a whole. NBB-Psy consists of an antemortem and postmortem donor program. This chapter focuses on the design of NBB-Psy and the antemortem donor program, where patients and relatives are actively informed on the possibility to become a brain donor. Since the initiation of NBB-Psy, the number of registered donors with a psychiatric diagnosis has increased from 149 in 2010 to 1018 in May 2016., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

The BrainNet Europe consortium, which is a consortium of 19 European brain banks, took the initiative to draft a series of documents to provide an ethical framework for brain banks to follow. The framework includes an ethical code of conduct, a model for brain bank regulations, and a toolkit containing several documents. The sources for the information included came from the laws, regulations, and guidelines (declarations, conventions, recommendations, guidelines, and directives) that had been issued by international key organizations, such as the Council of Europe, European Commission, World Medical Association, and World Health Organization. The code of conduct addresses fundamental topics such as the rights of the persons donating their tissue, the obligations of the brain bank with regard to respect and observance of such rights, informed consent, confidentiality, protection of personal data, collections of human biologic material and their management, and transparency and accountability within the organization of a brain bank. The code of conduct was ratified by all European brain banks in 2009. This chapter describes the process of establishing the code of conduct within the BrainNet Europe consortium and elaborates on three key aspects of the code of conduct, namely informed consent, genetics, and financial aspects in brain banking., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Toxic substances may affect the life history of a species in a variety of ways. Different species maintain different priorities in coping with the physiological consequences of toxicant-induced stress. This is expressed by changes in energy allocation to different life-history characteristics which may have great consequences for the response at the population level. In this study the terrestrial invertebrates Platynothrus peltifer (Oribatida), Orchesella cincta, Folsomia candida (Collembola), and Porcellio scaber (Isopoda) were chosen to evaluate species-specific sensitivity of life histories. Effects on reproduction and weight increase under exposure to cadmium in the food were analyzed. The answer to the question of which species is the most sensitive depends on the parameter chosen. A comparison of sensitivity on the basis of sublethal effects showed P. peltifer to be the most sensitive species; on the basis of lethal effects however, the species O. cincta was the most sensitive. This discrepancy between effect parameters resulted in differences between the distance of the concentrations at which lethal and sublethal effects occur for different species. The ratio between the lethal effect concentration and the sublethal effect concentration is called the sublethal sensitivity index (SSI) and is proposed as a parameter expressing maintenance of sublethal functions under toxicant stress. The SSI seems to be a valuable parameter for evaluating the likelihood of population-level effects under toxicant stress. To extrapolate effects found in the laboratory to the field situation, more attention should be paid to the relationships between effects on life-history parameters and effects on population growth.