The Unforgettable career of Suzanne Corkin

Over the course of the past half century, Suzanne Hammond Corkin (1937–2016) has made a remarkable number of contributions to our understanding of the neural bases of human cognition. She is, of course, best known for her career-long association with the amnesic patient H.M., eloquently summarized in her book Permanent Present Tense: The Unforgettable Life of the Amnesic Patient, H.M. (Corkin, 2013). From this association have come foundational insights into the functions of the hippocampus and surrounding tissue of the medial temporal lobe (MTL), and into the organization of memory. In addition to these contributions, her wide-ranging research has also explored the neural bases of perception and working memory, the interaction of emotion and memory, and the effects of aging and of age-related neurodegenerative disease on cognition. Throughout her celebrated career, she set a pioneering example for how to be successful as a woman in science. Suzanne Hammond grew up in the Hartford, Connecticut. As circumstance would have it, she was a childhood friend of the daughter of the neurosurgeon, William Beecher Scoville. She was of high-school age, and perhaps just a few miles distant, when Scoville performed the fateful bilateral medial temporal lobectomy on Henry Molaison, a 27-year-old with intractable epilepsy. She was pursing her B.A. at Smith College when Scoville and Milner published their initial report of H.M.’s case (Scoville and Milner, 1957). Shortly thereafter, she enrolled in the Clinical Psychology graduate program at McGill University, where she learned from and worked with some of the giants of neuroscience, including D.O. Hebb, Wilder Penfield, Herbert Jasper, Theodore Rasmussen, Robert Malmo, and her mentor Brenda Milner. She initially came to Milner with an interest in somesthesis, a topic on which she was to publish work carried out at the Montreal Neurological Institute (Corkin et al., 1964, 1970), as well as, several years later, with collaborators in Boston (Moore et al., 2000a,b). Most famously, however, it was also at this time that she began her work with H.M. The 1957 report from Scoville and Milner had established “a special importance to the anterior hippocampus and hippocampal gyrus in the retention of new experience” (p. 21). This was a revolutionary breakthrough in memory research. (Consider that, just a few years earlier, Lashley (1950) had noted that “I sometimes feel, in reviewing the evidence on the localization of the memory trace, that the necessary conclusion is that learning just is not possible. . . It is not possible to demonstrate the isolated localization of a memory trace anywhere within the nervous system” (p. 477–478).) Critically, H.M.’s profound memory impairment coexisted with an above-normal IQ, indicating that memory could be understood as dissociable from other high-level mental functions. Shortly thereafter, a second important conceptual breakthrough came with Milner’s demonstration that H.M. could retain learning of a sensorimotor skill (mirror tracing) despite no consciously accessible memory of his prior experience with the testing apparatus (Milner, 1962). Corkin followed up on this finding, demonstrating preserved learning in H.M. when navigating a tactually guided maze (Corkin, 1965), performing motor skills (Corkin, 1968), and recognizing degraded visual images (Milner et al., 1968). The implication of these findings was that memory, itself, was not a unitary entity, but could be neurally dissociated into different classes. One—which came to be known as declarative or explicit—was dependent on the hippocampus and MTL, and others—which became known as nondeclarative, procedural, or implicit—were not (e.g., Cohen and Squire, 1980; Schacter, 1987). After receiving her PhD in 1964, Suzanne Corkin moved to the laboratory of Hans-Lukas Teuber at MIT. During her first 15 years at MIT, she was the engine behind the Department of Psychology’s Clinical Research Center, where brain-injured subjects were studied. Years later, it was noted that this facility was “so original [for a department of psychology] that even today it is more admired than emulated” (Gross, 1994) (p. 453). During this time, Corkin also played a critical role in the editing of Neuropsychologia, the era’s leading journal of the neuroscientific study of human behavior. In 1977, Teuber’s untimely death led to two developments that were without precedent at MIT. First, although she held a research staff (i.e., not faculty) position, Corkin became director of the human neuropsychology lab. Second, in 1981, 1 Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry, University of Wisconsin– Madison, Madison, Wisconsin; 2 Department of Psychology, Boston College, Massachusetts *Correspondence to: Bradley R. Postle, Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI, USA. E-mail: postle@wisc.edu Received 11 July 2016; Accepted for publication 19 July 2016. DOI 10.1002/hipo.22618 Published online 20 July 2016 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com).