Patient H.M. (28 page)

Teuber recognized Henry's importance, which meant he also recognized the importance of Corkin's access to Henry, not to mention her personal relationship with Brenda Milner and William Beecher Scoville. By hiring Corkin, Teuber was acquiring not only a first-rate scientist practiced in his beloved lesion method but also by extension the world's premier lesion patient. Indeed, shortly after Corkin signed on at MIT, Teuber drove to my grandfather's office in Hartford for the first of many visits. Henry was waiting for him there, and Henry and Teuber drove back to Cambridge together. They parked outside a new redbrick building called the Clinical Research Center, and Teuber led Henry inside to a small bedroom where he would live for the next two weeks. During the four decades that followed that first visit, Henry made fifty-four individual trips to the Clinical Research Center, sometimes staying for as long as a month. A mountain of clinical data began piling up, the beginning of what would become the largest amount of data ever gathered on a single research subject. Still, for Henry, his new home never became any less bewildering than it was for him that first week, when three times he rang for a nurse in the middle of the night and posed an apologetic question.

“Where am I?” Henry asked. “And how did I come to be here?”

Hans-Lukas Teuber drowned during a vacation in the Virgin Islands in 1977.

By that point, Brenda Milner at McGill had largely ceded control of Henry-related research to MIT. Doing so made sense on a number of levels. For one thing, Hartford, where Henry lived, was much closer to Cambridge than to Montreal. For another, Milner had in many ways moved on. Her early work with Henry led directly to two groundbreaking discoveries: one, that memory function was localizable to a particular part of the brain, and two, that the brain contained at least two different and independent memory systems. That, for Milner, was enough. She was still deeply curious, still actively engaged in research, and still working with brain-lesioned patients at the Neuro, but her interests were increasingly migrating forward from the medial temporal lobes to the frontal lobes. She'd discovered Patient H.M. and made him famous, which made her famous in turn. Now she could let him go. Truth be told, it wasn't all that hard, on a personal level. Henry's memory deficits, his incessant repetition of the same stories, his inability to remember Milner or anyone else, made it difficult to establish anything but a superficial bond with him. “We found ourselves beginning to regard him the way you would regard a pet,” Milner once told an interviewer. “He lost his humanness. You can't build a friendship or any sort of human affection for the person.”

After Teuber's death, Corkin became the lead investigator for Patient H.M., a position she would hold until his death. In a book she wrote about Henry, Corkin explained the situation like this: “By the late 1970s I had become the primary point of contact for anyone who wanted to access him for research. Hans-Lukas Teuber died in 1977, and Brenda Milner moved on to other research topics while still maintaining a strong interest in Henry. I had inherited him as a patient.” She took her new responsibilities toward Henry seriously, and by all accounts displayed a genuine interest in his well-being. She would send him postcards on holidays, flowers on his birthday. She made sure he never lacked crossword puzzle books. She took good care of him, in her own way.

And Henry, in his own way, took good care of Corkin. Inheriting the world's most important human research subject was good for Corkin's career, scientifically and professionally. After Teuber's death, MIT invited her to head up her own laboratory, and although thousands of different research subjects eventually participated in studies at the new Behavioral Neuroscience Laboratory, Henry was clearly the lab's most prized asset. Many of the graduate students and postdocs who applied for positions with Corkin did so in the hopes of getting a chance to work with the famous Patient H.M., and over the years more than 22 percent of the papers that came out of the lab were about Henry. Those papers were also the ones that gained the most attention and interest, both among the wider scientific community and the general public. This attention and interest all raised the profile of Corkin and her laboratory, which received millions of dollars in private and federal funding. “I came to realize Henry's limitless worth as a research participant,” Corkin would later write, adding that “Henry was certainly a boon to my lab's reputation.”

She became Henry's gatekeeper, fielding all requests from outside researchers who wanted to work with him. She said that she “felt strongly that Henry should not be made available to every person who wanted to meet him” and that if she had allowed “all interested researchers to test and interview him, the resulting free-for-all would have been a constant drain on his time and energy.” Even within the lab, Corkin imposed strict rules related to the interactions that people were allowed to have with Henry. She forbade photography and video. To this day, no video of Henry has been made public. Jenni Ogden, a neuropsychologist from New Zealand who spent years working in Corkin's lab, recalls that she once surreptitiously took a few snapshots of Henry while she was running some tests with him in 1986. Years later, long after she'd left the lab to start her own at the University of Auckland, she was having a friendly catch-up chat with Corkin when she mentioned having taken those pictures.

Corkin went silent on the other end of the line.

“I want you to send those pictures to me,” she said finally. “And I want you to destroy the negatives.”

Similarly, when Endel Tulving, one of the world's leading memory researchers, met Henry he asked Corkin whether he could tape-record their conversation, and she refused. “It's just silliness,” Tulving said later.

Howard Eichenbaum, a renowned Boston University neuroscientist and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, told me that there were two ways to interpret Corkin's zealous guardianship of Henry. Eichenbaum usually works with rats, but during the 1980s he and Corkin collaborated on a few papers involving Henry. “Certainly I think she would say that she was hugely protective of Henry,” he said, “but there are two things that are going on.” He explained that when researchers like Corkin gain privileged access to an important human research subject like Henry, they know that “this is their resource, this is where they are going to get their data from.” He contrasted animal-focused researchers such as himself, who “can always order some more rats,” to human-focused researchers such as Corkin, who can never hope to find another Henry. “Everyone who has an amnesic patient guards the access to them,” Eichenbaum said, “because
they
want to do the experiments on them. They can't do all those experiments at once, so it's going to play out over years, and they don't really want to share.” Eichenbaum said it was inevitable that Corkin and her colleagues would develop possessive feelings toward Henry. “They kind of
own,
in some sense—although obviously you don't own people—that resource. They have the contact for that resource, so they want to hold on to that resource to do the experiments herself.”

According to Eichenbaum, Corkin's fierceness as a gatekeeper was understandable. After all, he said, “her career is based on having that proprietary access.”

Memory scientists often speak of the important difference between knowing that a certain fact is true and knowing how you came to learn it. For example, here's a simple question: What's the capital of France? The answer probably leapt to your mind in an instant. Now, here's another question: When exactly did you learn that Paris is the capital of France? If you're like most people, you have no idea. That particular fact twinkles in your mind amid an enormous constellation of other facts, most of them forever disconnected from the moment they first sprang to life. That store of mostly disconnected facts is known as your semantic memory.

Your semantic memory is contrasted with your episodic memory, which is your memory of fleshed-out narratives rather than merely facts. When you engage your episodic memory, you engage in a form of mental time travel, bringing yourself back to a particular place and time, reimagining a scene you've already lived. When you engage your semantic memory you are doing the mental equivalent of flipping through an encyclopedia or photo album, plucking out bits of information whose origins might be unclear. Incidentally, semantic memory can also be autobiographical. You might know for certain that you are capable of walking on your hands without remembering the day you first learned how to do so. In neuroscientific shorthand, this is known as the difference between “knowing
that
” and “knowing
how.
”

One of the most remarkable things that came to light during Suzanne Corkin's research with Henry had to do with this distinction between episodic and semantic memory. Prior to Corkin, the basic understanding of Henry's amnesia could be summarized as follows: The lesions in his brain prevented him from acquiring any new episodic or semantic memories while the episodic and semantic memories he'd acquired prior to the operation were left more or less intact. As it turned out, this was incorrect. Through a series of experiments, Corkin and her colleagues demonstrated that virtually all of Henry's episodic memories, even the ones that had been created prior to the operation, either no longer existed or were completely inaccessible to him. He didn't just have no postoperative episodic memories, he had no episodic memories, period. Instead of being able to do what the rest of us can do—use our minds to reexperience and reexamine many of the stories of our lives—Henry was left with the ability only to rifle through his mind's files of disconnected facts, never knowing the context or origins of any of them, never stringing them together into real, living narratives. As Corkin put it, Henry's entire past, even predating the operation, had become “semanticized.”

Although MIT is an institution where scientists have access to all the best and most expensive neuroscientific tools, from MRIs to PETs to EEGs, the way Corkin and her colleagues proved that Henry lacked an ability to access episodic memories was decidedly low-tech. They interviewed him. For hours and hours, they sat and asked him about his past. Henry could easily recall his date of birth—two twenty-six, twenty-six—but now they asked if he could describe a specific birthday party, any birthday party ever. It turned out he could not. He could pull up facts about himself, about his family, about the world—but he couldn't string these facts together into episodes, narratives, stories. This basic deficit, and his seeming efforts to compensate for and talk around it, was heartbreaking.

“What is your favorite memory of your mother?” Corkin once asked Henry during an interview in 1992.

“Well, I—that she's my mother.”

“But can you remember any particular event that was special—like a holiday, Christmas, birthday, Easter?”

“There I have an argument about myself about Christmastime.”

“What about Christmas?”

“Well, 'cause my daddy was from the South, and they didn't celebrate down there like they do up here—in the North. Like they don't have trees or anything like that. And, uh, but he came north even though he was born in Louisiana. And I know the name of the town he was born in.”

Another researcher once asked Henry if he'd ever fallen in love. He told her that he had.

“Okay, tell me about it.”

“Well, just how you felt and everything and the ways it could be. And they would fall for you. And you still don't know.”

“Can you tell me about when you first felt that you were falling in love with somebody? One specific event?”

“No.”

“No, you can't think of that? Can you think of one specific event lasting for several hours from your early childhood? Can you come up with anything like that?”

“No, I can't.”

Henry's almost complete lack of episodic memories is difficult to relate to. We are a storytelling species, and we spend a great deal of our time stringing the facts of our pasts into narratives in the present. A mind unable to do so can seem like a fundamentally alien mind. Forgetfulness is one thing—we've all got porous memories—but the deficits Henry endured are something else altogether. It may in fact be impossible to know what it was like to experience life through Henry's eyes, from within Henry's mind, but it's important to remember that most of the episodes from our own lives become semanticized over time, bleached of their context. My own episodic memory, for example, has countless pits and gulfs and vacuums.

I have no idea when I first heard of Patient H.M. Maybe it was from my mother. Maybe when I was a kid she told me that her father had once performed an experimental operation and that his patient had gone on to become an important research subject. Or maybe I learned about him some other way. I know that by the time I went to college I had a vague understanding of H.M.'s story. I dated a psychology major for a while, and I remember trying to impress her with my family connection to one of the central figures in her textbooks. Still, the specific moment that the seed planted itself in my mind is gone, and all that's left is the disconnected certainty that at some point I must have learned the basic story of Patient H.M. I know that I did, but I don't know how.

My memory of what happened when I first began to pursue Henry's story for myself is much richer.

In March 2004 I went to Chicago for the annual meeting of the national City and Regional Magazine Association. I'd been working as a staff writer at
Atlanta
magazine for a year or so, churning out features about local hip-hop stars, neo-Nazi detectives, and Jimmy Carter. On the final day of the meeting there was a big banquet and awards presentation, and I won some. It turned out that one of the judges was an editor at
Esquire.
He called me up a week later and asked if I had any story ideas.