Patient HM: Gone But Not Forgotten

The most famous neuroscience patient of the modern era died of respiratory failure on December 2, 2008, at 5:05 PM Eastern Time. Not long after, the body of 82-year-old Henry Molaison — known simply as H.M. in hundreds of scientific papers — went on a two-hour ride from his nursing home in Windsor Locks, Connecticut, to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. The cadaver spent the next nine hours inside of an MRI machine, getting scanned every which way.Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, neuroanatomist Jacopo Annese rushed to the San Diego airport and boarded a red-eye flight to Boston. After landing, and pounding a few cups of coffee, he went to the hospital to join neuropathologist Matthew Frosch in the meticulous and high-stakes extraction of H.M.’s brain.H.M. had one of the most important brains in the world, at least if you ask a neuroscientist. In 1953, at age 27, he underwent experimental brain surgery to treat the terrible seizures that had plagued him since childhood. The seizures quieted after surgeon William Beecher Scoville removed pieces of the temporal lobes above his ears — including, notably, large parts of the hippocampus — but it came at the cost of permanent amnesia. For the rest of his life, H.M. could only hold on to memories of events that happened before his surgery.Though he couldn’t remember what he had for breakfast, H.M. could learn new motor memory tasks and had normal intelligence, illustrating both the specificity of the hippocampus and the multifaceted nature of memory. All of this we know thanks to decades of work by Suzanne Corkin and her colleagues at McGill University and MIT. As Corkin writes in her fascinating new book Permanent Present Tense, “Henry’s disability, a tremendous cost to him and his family, became science’s gain.”Read more at...Only Human, January 2014.