by Mary Roach
Henry himself, of course, is oblivious to his own burgeoning importance. After the operation, he continues to live with his parents. The operation did succeed in reducing the frequency and severity of his seizures, and Henry is perfectly capable of helping out with tasks around the house. He can mow the lawn just fine, since the cut grass itself shows him what he has already cut and what he has not. His father, an electrician, dies in 1967, when Henry is forty-one years old. Henry goes back to work, packing lighters at a rehabilitation center designed to provide constructive occupations for mentally retarded people. A few years after that, he and his mother, whose health is failing, move into the home of an aunt. In 1977 Henry's mother moves into a nursing home. Henry lives alone with his aunt until 1980. When she becomes too ill to care for him, he moves into the Bickford Health Care Center. A conservator is appointed, a cousin of Henry's, and that conservator, like Henry's guardians before him, signs waivers allowing the scientists to continue their work.
Milner spends nearly two decades studying Henry. Then she moves on, pursues other research interests, lets other scientists pick up with Henry where she left off.
Researcher: Are you happy?
Henry: Yes. What I, well, the way I figure it is, what they find out about me helps them to help other people. And that's more important. That's what I thought about being, too. A doctor.
R: Really?
H: A brain surgeon.
R: Tell me about that.
H: And as soon as I started to wear glasses, in a way, I said no to myself.
R: Why?
H: Because [during] brain surgery you have bright lights, and I thought there would be an extra glare from the rim of your glasses that would go into your eye. And right at the moment you want to make the great reseverance, the most important severance, you just might move a little too far...
Jacopo Annese usually drives a Porsche, but today, summer 2006, he's a passenger in a sedan watching the desiccated red-brick husks of old paper mills glide by his window. Main Street, Windsor Locks, Connecticut, just a few blocks from the Bickford Health Care Center, where he's going to meet Henry for the first time. He's a little surprised, to be honest, that Suzanne Corkin, who's driving, didn't make him wear a bag over his head. Corkin, a former graduate student of Brenda Milner's at McGill, who runs the Behavioral Neuroscience Laboratory at MIT, took over as the lead investigator on all things Henry-related in the late 1970s. She is known to be fiercely protective of her prized test subject, vetting researchers exhaustively, demanding the signing of nondisclosure contracts, disallowing tape recorders, that sort of thing. She's built a good portion of her career on her special access to Henry, and she won't let just anybody in.
But when Annese requested that she set up this meeting, when he told her that he'd really like to see Henry at least once while Henry was still alive, she consented, arranged it, even chauffeured him.
Corkin first met Henry at Brenda Milner's lab in Montreal in 1962, and over the years, as the mining of his mind has continued, she's witnessed firsthand how Henry continues to give up riches, broadening our understanding of how memory works. But she's also keenly aware of Henry's enduring mysteries, has documented things about him that nobody can quite explain, not yet.
For example, Henry's inability to recall postoperative episodes, an amnesia that was once thought to be complete, has revealed itself over the years to have some puzzling exceptions. Certain things have managed, somehow, to make their way through, to stick and become memories. Henry knows a president was assassinated in Dallas, though Kennedy's motorcade didn't leave Love Field until more than a decade after Henry left my grandfather's operating room. Henry can hear the incomplete name of an icon—"Bob Dy..."—and complete it; even though in 1953 Robert Zimmerman was just a twelve-year-old chafing against the dead-end monotony of small-town Minnesota. Henry can tell you that Archie Bunker's son-in-law is named Meathead.
How is this possible?
And Corkin has discovered a number of other curious, anomalous, presently inexplicable things about Henry. For instance, if she holds a dolorimeter, a handheld, gun-shaped device housing a hundred-watt bulb, to the underside of Henry's forearm, he is able to tolerate the resulting pain for longer periods of time than most people. Is he naturally, congenitally pain-resistant? Or did my grandfather's removal of his amygdala, an organ that sits just in front of the hippocampus and is suspected to mediate both emotion and pain, account for his toughness?
And why, as Corkin has also discovered, is Henry able to recognize the intensity of smells but not their provenance, unable to discriminate the fragrance of a rose from the stench of dog shit? Is the hippocampus responsible for smell identification as well? Or had my grandfather's "suction catheter" inadvertently damaged Henry's nearby olfactory bulb as well?
You can spend a half century testing somebody, examining, poking, prodding, feeding—Henry will happily eat at least two full dinners in a row if you give him a minute between removing the first tray and replacing it with the second—and you can come up with all sorts of theories to explain your findings. You can even throw a person in an MRI machine, study the flickering images on your computer screen. But the brain is the ultimate black box. Eventually, to grasp the first cut, you'll have to make another.
The car pulls into the parking lot of the nursing home, noses into an empty space. Annese and Corkin get out and walk inside together. Henry's waiting. The three have lunch in the cafeteria.
He's an old man now, overweight, wheelchair-bound, largely incommunicative. Lately, Henry's creeping decrepitude has itself suggested some new experiments. During another meeting, Corkin quizzed Henry on how old he thought he was. He guessed that he was perhaps in his thirties. Then she handed him a mirror.
"What do you think about how you look?" she asked while he stared at himself.
"I'm not a boy," he said eventually.
Still, despite Henry's current condition, his lack of engagement, Annese is glad to get a chance to meet him, to spend at least a little time around him. Ever since graduate school, he's always found the anonymous cadavers the hardest. It makes it much easier, for some reason, if you know something about the person as a person before you deal with the person as a corpse.
On the way out, Annese notices a snapshot of Henry tacked to one of the bulletin boards near the entrance. Nobody's looking, and he has to resist the temptation to take it, to slip it into his pocket, to keep it as a sort of totem, something he could ponder in his off-hours, something he could use to help him imagine his way further into Henry's mind before the day he has to start digging into his brain.
Sometime around 1969, in the middle of taking some tests, Henry suddenly stopped and looked up at his examiner.
"Right now," he said, "I'm wondering, have I done or said something amiss? You see, at this moment, everything looks clear to me, but what happened just before? That's what worries me. It's like waking from a dream."
He might have said the same thing, felt the same way, in 1979, 1989, 1999. Every day, every waking hour. The world around him evolving, changing, growing, while the world within him cycles endlessly, fruitlessly. Memory is the traction of our lives. Without it, you can't move. You're nowhere at all, really. Like when you're just waking from a dream.
Some researchers once decided to find out what would happen if you actually did wake Henry from a dream. He spent several nights in a sleep laboratory, hooked up to sensors. Whenever he entered REM sleep, a researcher would shake him till his eyes opened and then ask him what he'd been dreaming about. He usually just talked about the same sorts of things he liked to talk about when he was awake—childhood memories of a road trip to Florida with his parents, of shooting targets in his backyard, of fishing with his dad. In the end, the researchers never published their dream studies, because nobody could decide whether Henry was dreaming at all, whether he was even capable of dreaming. But some of the transcripts survived.
Henry, Henry, Henry!
Oh!
Were you dreaming?
Yeah.
What were you dreaming about?
I was having an argument with myself...
About what?
What I could have been ... I dreamed of Pennsylvania. I dreamed of being a doctor. A brain surgeon. And it was all quick. Flashlike, being successful. And living down that way ... tall straight trees.
My grandfather grew up in Pennsylvania, got his M.D. at U Penn.
And yes, he was successful.
You could argue that Henry gives his career, like the careers of many other people, a boost. Gets his name out there, at the top of one of the most important scientific papers of the era and in the citations of thousands of others. He goes on to become clinical professor of neurosurgery emeritus at Yale and serves as president of both the American Academy of Neurological Surgery and the World Federation of Neurosurgical Societies.
Unlike Henry, he can move on. New patients, new procedures, a life steadily unfurling. A sustained narrative. Henry is an important episode in his past, but other episodes follow.
Still, he never performs another operation like the one he performed on Henry, and his characteristic hubris is, I like to think, tempered by a deeper appreciation for the dangers inherent in opening a man's skull. In 1973, during a conference about the ethics of brain surgery, he listens while a younger colleague of his, Dr. José Delgado, a professor of neurophysiology at Yale, advocates for the widespread use of corrective neural implants. Dr. Delgado, in an earlier publicity stunt, stopped a charging bull in its tracks by remotely activating electrodes he'd planted in its brain. "The question," Dr. Delgado declares, "rather than, What is man? should be, What kind of man are we going to construct?"
"With all due respect to Dr. Delgado," my grandfather responds, "I work almost wholly on humans, and we are more aware of the disastrous effects that sometimes occur in neurosurgery."
He died in a car crash on the New Jersey Turnpike eleven years later, in 1984. He was seventy-eight years old and still operating on patients at least once a week.
Winter 2008. New employees at the Bickford Health Care Center always receive a briefing on Henry and his special circumstances.
For example, they are directed never to speak to anyone outside the center about Henry, as the fact that he resides there is a closely guarded secret. If a stranger calls inquiring after Henry, the staff member receiving the call is supposed to give a noncommittal response neither confirming nor denying his presence and then immediately phone Henry's conservator, warning him about the snoop. The cloak of anonymity placed over Henry is effective: he has lived at the center for decades, and though he is the most famous patient in the history of neuroscience, no outsider has ever found him.
New staff are also briefed on the special rules that apply specifically to Henry's dying and his death. Suzanne Corkin drafted these rules, and the rules are printed out and always attached to Henry's chart.
So on the morning and afternoon of December 2, as Henry froths and gasps, fading from respiratory failure at age eighty-two, Corkin, as per protocol, receives periodic phone calls, keeping her abreast of the situation.
When his heart finally stops, a final call is placed to Corkin, and then someone at the center rushes to the freezer and digs out the flexible Cryopaks that were placed there in anticipation of this moment. By the time the hearse arrives, the ice blankets are wrapped securely around Henry's head, keeping his brain nice and cool.
Everything goes smoothly, according to plan, and a couple of hours and 106 miles later, the hearse pulls into the parking lot of Building 149 in the Charlestown Navy Yard, the Athinoula Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, in Boston, where Corkin is waiting.
The body bag is unzipped and the ice blankets unwrapped. Corkin has known Henry for forty-six years, having met him for the first time when she was still a graduate student in Brenda Milner's lab at McGill. Of course, her relationship with Henry, transaction-ally speaking, was just like Milner's: she knew Henry, not the other way around. Forty-six years of meeting someone for the first time, introducing yourself to an old friend. And now this last meeting that only she will remember.
During the night that follows, Corkin watches as Henry undergoes a series of high-resolution MRI scans. Then, the next morning, she attends the harvesting. She stands on a chair outside the autopsy room in the Mass General pathology department and peeks in through a window as Jacopo Annese and two other men saw off the top of Henry's skull and, with the care of obstetricians delivering a baby, pull his brain into the light. Corkin has spent the bulk of her career pondering the inner workings of Henry's brain. Now she finally gets to see it.
Later the brain sits for a while inside a bucket that's inside a cooler, steeping in a preservative solution, hanging upside down, suspended by a piece of kitchen twine looped through its basilar artery. Eventually, when the brain is firm enough to travel safely, Corkin rides to Logan Airport with the cooler. She accompanies it to the gate of a JetBlue flight from Boston to San Diego. There are cameramen following her. It's a self-consciously historic moment. She already has a book and movie deal. She puts the cooler down and Annese picks it up. Corkin thinks of Henry's brain as a treasure. She watches Annese walk down the ramp with it. She watches them disappear.
It's hard to let go.
There's a slim book sitting on a shelf right next to Annese's desk in his glass-walled office at the Brain Observatory in San Diego. Unlike a lot of the other books in this place—A Study of Error, Serial Murder Syndrome, Man and Society in Calamity, Flesh in the Age of Reason, The Open and Closed Mind—this one doesn't have a very lively title. But Localization in the Cerebral Cortex, by Korbinian Brodmann, is, to Annese, as vital a book as can be. It was originally published in 1909 and contains a series of meticulous hand-drawn maps of the human brain, divided up into fifty-two so-called Brodmann areas, each unique in its neuronal organization and, consequently, its function. Brodmann gleaned the borders of his areas through a rough and painstaking combination of microscopy and histology, and he did a great job, all things considered. He created an enduring Rand McNally road atlas of the mind, one that my grandfather used to direct his surgeries and one that most neuroscientists and neurosurgeons still use today.
As a fellow anatomist, Annese admires Brodmann's work immensely and recently wrote a glowing tribute to him that appeared in the journal Nature. But he will soon make Brodmann's old maps irrelevant.
That's what the Brain Observatory is all about, really.
If Korbinian Brodmann created the mind's Rand McNally, Jacopo Annese is creating its Google Maps.
A short walk from Annese's office, past an imported espresso machine and through a secure door, a number of tall, glass-fronted refrigerators stand against a wall. Many of these refrigerators contain plastic buckets, and though the plastic is murkier than the glass, you can still see what's inside. Most of the brains are human, but there is one from a dolphin, too. The dolphin brain is huge, significantly bigger than any of the human ones, though Annese cautions that it would be a mistake to read too much into size.
And what's true of individual brains is true of brain collections as well. With his Brain Observatory, Annese is setting out to create not the world's largest but the world's most useful collection of brains. Each specimen will, through a proprietary process developed by Annese, be preserved in both histological and digital form, at an unprecedented, neuronal level of resolution. Unlike Brodmann's hand-drawn sketches, Annese's maps will be three-dimensional and fully scalable, allowing future neuroscientists to zoom in from an overhead view of the hundred-billion-neuron forest all the way down to whatever intriguing thicket they like. And though each individual brain is by definition unique, as more and more brains come online, both the commonalities and differences between them should become increasingly apparent, allowing, Annese hopes, for the eventual synthesis of the holy grail of any neuroanatomist: a modern multidimensional atlas of the human mind, one that conclusively ma
ps form to function. For the first time, we'll be able to meaningfully and easily compare large numbers of brains, perhaps finally understanding why one brain might be less empathetic or better at calculus or likelier to develop Alzheimer's than another. The Brain Observatory promises to revolutionize our understanding of how these three-pound hunks of tissue inside our skulls do what they do, which means, of course, that it promises to revolutionize our understanding of ourselves.
And what could be a better cornerstone for the Brain Observatory, what could be a better first volume for Annese's collection, than the infinitely pored-over brain of Patient H. M.? The boxes containing the cryogenic vials containing the slices of Henry's brain sit in their own freezers, to the left of the others, under lock and key. Precious cargo. San Diego is earthquake-prone, but there are backup generators and sensors that will automatically dial Annese's home and cell phones in the event of an emergency, so that wherever he is, he can jump into his Porsche, rush over, protect Henry.
Henry, just by being Henry, helps bring Annese's larger ambitions closer to reality. People who've read newspaper articles about Annese's work with Henry's brain have already called him up, made direct arrangements to donate their own. One of them, Bette, a feisty eighty-one-year-old who was one of the original flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz, will be dropping by the Brain Observatory soon to get her second set of MRI scans. Annese knows the publicity will continue, hopes it will continue to inspire donations. He had wanted to get the brain of the guy Rain Man was based on, but that hadn't worked out. Eventually he'd like to get somebody really big, a household name, Bill Clinton, someone like that.