Reviews

• Highly readable and accessible

  Fantastic scientific reporting on a captivating story, told from the point of view of someone with unique insight into the subject. It starts off with a great introduction to the history of psychology and "psychosurgery", and is interspersed with interesting and relevant vignettes of the human drama that led to that fateful day in 1953, when Patient H.M. was "born". I thought the descriptions of the history and development of the barbaric practice of prefrontal lobotomy were particularly illuminating. Dittrich has a way of writing that allows the reader to see the facts and draw one's own conclusions; for instance, that the experimental surgeries performed on back ward asylum patients in the US were really as barbaric and inhuman as Nazi experimentation on men and women in concentration camps. Although one of those surgeons (who operated on asylum patients, not a Nazi), was his grandfather, he pulls no punches and what emerges is the image of a man who was a cowboy in the early days of neurosurgery. Reckless, egotistical, and yet innovative. Whatever else you might say about him, neuroscience would not be what it is today without him, and Patient H.M. I see that at least one Corkin supporter has so far come to her defense and derided the book because of the author's accusations of misconduct and a lack of cooperation with her peers. As an aspiring neuroscientist, I have to say that based on the evidence presented, rather than the words or opinions either for or against her, it appears that Corkin was in fact uncooperative and possessive of Henry's brain, it is possible that she did conceal data, and her actions were conspicuous in this regard. Surely it would not be abnormal for other researchers to have differing opinions or interpretations of the data? Why should she be so conspicuously against other interpretations being published? In any case, the reality is Corkin's way of treating the situation is part of a huge problem in scientific academia- that is, limiting the access to information to only a chosen elite. Henry's brain is a boon to all of science, and should not be reserved for only a select few. That is in fact one of the things I loved about this book - I felt it was very accessible and engaging, and that many people would enjoy reading it and learn a great deal about the history of psychology and neuroscience from it. Regardless of the portrayal of some of the human drama involved, I can't help but be in favor of broader dispersal of scientific knowledge.

• Un-putdownable

  An exceptional saga of medical ethics, evolution of our understanding of brain and its machinations and history of experimentations. Author has developed a commendable perspective through evident research. Only, at times he appears to be given to a bit of sensationalism. Still and outstanding book.

• Excelente libro

  Me pareció una lectura exquisita. Al principio no me gusto porque me daba la impresion que el autor debrayaba mucho para llenar hojas. Al principio del libro se la pasaba hablando de su bisabuelo y sus viajes y los adornos de su casa y demas cosas demasiado personales que daban la impresion de desviar del texto sobre H.M. De repente me di cuenta que el bisabuelo de quien tanto hablaba era nada mas que William Scoville (quien removió el hipocampo a H.M.) y la cosa cambia. A lo largo de la lectura, el autor tambien nos deja claro que Brenda Milner fue la gran científica detras de H.M. y Suzzane Corkin la vivales que se aprovecho de H.M. hasta despues de su muerte.... O al menos esa es la impresion que me dejo esta maravillosa lectura. Muy buen libro para quien pertenece al mundo de las neurociencias

• This is a remarkable book, part personal account, ...

  This is a remarkable book, part personal account, part scientific detective story, and overall a riveting description of a revolutionary discovery in the neurobiology of memory. The author’s relationship to William Scoville, the neurosurgeon who performed the temporal-lobe resection on H.M. – Dittrich is Scoville’s grandson – is explored via intimate details of his family’s history. The book provides some important insights into what led to the surgery on H.M., although some mysteries and enigmas still remain (e.g., did Scovile perform a lobotomy on his own wife, Dittrich’s grandmother?). And it presents a fascinating and in some ways disturbing history of the events and players in this medical/scientific drama. For example, Dittrich describes at length a scientific dispute between the neuroanatomist Jacopo Annese, who performed the exquisite postmortem dissection of H.M.’s brain, and Suzanne Corkin, the MIT neuropsychologist who had studied H.M. for many decades. According to Dittrich, Corkin was extremely reluctant to share information about H.M., and he describes how Corkin and Annese were collaborators and then antagonists over the analysis and interpretation of Annese’s anatomical work on H.M.’s brain. Corkin had even managed to secure ownership of H.M.’s brain for MIT, and Dittrich documents the questionable justification for this. Corkin also told the author that she had destroyed decade’s worth of records of interviews with and unpublished studies of H.M., a disturbing revelation of behavior that, to me at least, is unethical and borders on scholarly misconduct. In any case, in its description of the lobotomizing crusader Scoville, who really was a cowboy as far as adhering to medical ethics is concerned, and of the unbridled competitiveness and wrangles that occurred around access to and testing of H.M. in subsequent years, the book illustrates how ego and excessive ambition can adversely affect scientific progress. An excerpt from the book published in the Magazine of the Sunday NY Times was centered primarily on the dispute between Corkin and Annese, and this led me to the concern that sufficient recognition had not been given to Brenda Milner, who was Corkin’s graduate supervisor at McGill University and who initially performed the seminal and revolutionary research characterizing and exploring H.M.’s memory deficits. Upon reading the whole book, however, I was relieved to find that Dittrich gives full credit to Milner’s insight, ingenuity, and brilliance in first alerting neuroscience to H.M.’s profound deficit in memory. Incidentally, Milner’s research transformed the field by identifying a critical role for the hippocampus and other nearby structures in the formation of long-term memories, and it set the stage for research performed by O’Keefe, Moser, and Moser that identified the participation of the hippocampus in forming spatial memories and led to those researchers receiving Nobel prizes in 2014. It is therefore puzzling to me that Milner’s fundamental contributions have not also been recognized by the Nobel Academy. Some readers have objected to the style of the book, in which Dittrich employs flashbacks and personal vignettes to tell his story. But these devices enhance the readability and the suspense of the book, in my opinion, and make it more accessible to the non-specialist. My reservations about the book are different. For one, Dittrich offers an extended discussion of the gruesome experiments performed by the Nazis on human subjects, resulting in the development of the Nuremberg code for ethical research after WW II. The implication seems to be that the neurosurgeons who performed lobotomies (presumably including temporal lobe resections, as in H.M.’s case) were conducting unethical research on their patients, research akin to the activities of the Nazis. However, neurosurgeons are of course operating on people as a clinical intervention intended to benefit them, with research as a secondary purpose. There was no such clinical or therapeutic purpose in the activities on the Nazis. For another, at one point Dittrich also seems to dismiss the relevance of brain research on animals, with the erroneous justification that what we learn from animals cannot be applied to human beings (who are of course animals, but animals of a different stripe). In contrast, there are numerous examples of findings about the brain in animals being confirmed in human beings. See for example O’Keefe’s discovery of place cells in the hippocampus of rats and the subsequent observation of increased volume of the hippocampus in people who have undergone spatial training to become London cabbies. But these are really minor quibbles and do not detract from the value of the book. Altogether, the book is a must read for anyone interested in the neurobiology of memory and the history of modern neuroscience.

• Case muito curioso

  Para estudantes de neurociências

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