Luke Dittrich

Luke Dittrich is a National Magazine Award-winning journalist and contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine. Now, in his first book, Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets, he explores the scientific, ethical and, above all, human dimensions of one of the most important stories in the history of medicine.

Patient H.M. is both a wide-ranging scientific odyssey and a deeply personal exploration of Dittrich’s own family history. In 1953, Dittrich’s grandfather—a brilliant, risk-taking neurosurgeon whose own wife’s mental illness had inspired him to become a hugely prolific lobotomist—performed an experimental brain operation on a young man named Henry Molaison, a procedure which unexpectedly destroyed Molaison’s ability to create new memories. Patient H.M., as Molaison would be known, went on to become the most studied individual in the history of science, a human guinea pig who spent the next six decades living his life in four-minute increments. In exploring the long history of brain science, the book takes readers from Ancient Egypt to 18th-century asylums to modern laboratories, while continually raising urgent ethical and moral questions about how far we’ve gone, and how far we continue to go, in our ruthless pursuit of knowledge.

A contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and a contributing editor at Esquire, Luke Dittrich’s on-the-job experiences include running a marathon in Antarctica and walking 340 miles along the United States/Mexico border. His articles have appeared in anthologies ranging from Best American Crime Writing to Best American Travel Writing to Best American Science and Nature Writing. In 2012 he received the National Magazine Award for feature writing, and is a frequent guest on radio and television programs like NPR’s Weekend Edition and NBC’s Today Show.