Luke Dittrich: It’s one of those odd facts about my relationship to the story: I don’t have a clear episodic memory about when I first learned about Patient H.M. Dittrich has himself responded to the rebuttals, and at the end of this interview, I talk to him about the debate.Įd Yong: Given your family connections to the story, were you aware about ‘Patient H.M.’ growing up? The controversy culminated in a statement from MIT, where Corkin was based, rebutting three allegations in the book. Following a New York Times excerpt published on August 7th, and the book’s release two weeks later, many neuroscientists have expressed “ outrage” at Dittrich’s portrayal of Corkin.

Most of this interview was conducted on July 19 th. I spoke to him about the book and the challenges of reporting a story that he was so deeply entwined in. Suzanne Corkin, the scientist who worked with Molaison most extensively after his surgery, was an old friend of his mother’s. It’s a story about more than just the life of one man or the root of memory it’s also about how far people are willing to go for scientific advancement, and the human cost of that progress.Īnd Dittrich is uniquely placed to consider these issues. As revealed through Dittrich’s extensive reporting and poetic prose, Molaison’s tale is one of ethical dilemmas that not only influenced his famous surgery but persisted well beyond his death in 2008. That’s the familiar version of the story, but the one presented in Luke Dittrich’s new book Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets is deeper and darker. These problems revolutionized our understanding of how memory works, and transformed Molaison into “Patient H.M.”-arguably the most famous and studied patient in the history of neuroscience. Everyone he met, every conversation he had, everything that happened to him would just evaporate from his mind. It worked, but the procedure left Molaison unable to make new long-term memories. Twenty years later, a surgeon named William Scoville tried to cure him by removing parts of his brain. At the age of seven, Henry Gustav Molaison was involved in an accident that left him with severe epilepsy.

Patient H.M. by Luke Dittrich