We are saddened to hear of the death of Suzanne Corkin (MIT).
Suzanne Corkin, whose painstaking work with a famous amnesiac known as H.M. helped clarify the biology of memory and its disorders, died on Tuesday in Danvers, Mass. She was 79.
Sue was a phenomenal neuroscientist and communicator who carely deeply about her work, especially with Henry Molaison, widely known as H.M. After having parts of his brain removed in a 1953 operation to address his intractable epilepsy, H.M. was left with a unique type of amnesia. He then spent the next 55 years working with neuroscientists, including Corkin, to revolutionize human understanding of memory:
copyright: Lisa M.P. Munoz
“She was able to take this single case and do such meticulous work on the anatomy and its effects on memory that it helped settle these questions,” said Morris Moscovitch, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. “That is one hallmark of her work. The other is how much she cared for H.M. She wasn’t merely using him — she became his caretaker, she took care of him like family.”
In fond memory of Sue, revisit her 2014 keynote lecture at the CNS annual meeting in Boston. Her passing is a big loss for the CNS community and the world.
