Is There a Neurobiology of Hate

Some months ago at a Holocaust conference in Scottsdale, I had the pleasure of hearing a provocative presentation by Kenneth Stern on the sources of antisemitism and how antisemitism might be related to hatred. This occurred shortly after I had talked at the same conference about my experiences in 1946-1947 as a U.S. Army motion picture photographer at the Nuremberg Medical Trials, where I had witnessed and made sound movies of the trial of the 23 defendants, mostly physicians, accused of experimenting on concentration camp victims and causing the deaths of untold numbers of them. So I thought I had some firsthand experience of hatred and the individuals who practiced it. Most of my subsequent career has been centered on performing research in the neurosciences: neurophysiology and neuroanatomy.