Out on 101

A journalist, a neuroscientist, and the quest for memory

Terry McDermott spent three and a half years in the Middle East, Europe, and Asia pursuing the story of the 9-11 hijackers: who they were and why they did it.

This was a ridiculously difficult task. He found himself in places like Karachi, Pakistan asking the hijackers’ friends and families questions almost nobody wanted to hear. Improbably, Terry, who at the time was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, got the story. The four major Times stories he wrote about the terrorists and the 9-11 plot  were later expanded into a book called Perfect Soldiers that was widely praised as a remarkable feat of reportage.

“We’ll never know it all, but Terry McDermott comes as close as anyone has – and perhaps ever will – to explaining how nineteen zealots came to the place they did,” wrote the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh, the dean of investigative reporters. “It’s in all the details, and they are all here. This is journalism at its best.”

The work took its toll. He returned to his wife and two daughters in Manhattan Beach looking for respite.

“I came back and I was just exhausted,” Terry said. “Really, I was out on my feet after Perfect Soldiers. It was deeply depressing. I dreamed about it almost every night and I didn’t read a single book for three-and-a-half years that didn’t have to do somehow with terrorism. It was just all absorbing and saddening.”

And so when he returned to the newspaper, Times managing editor Dean Baquet asked him what he wanted to do next.

“I don’t know,” Terry said. “I haven’t thought about that much, but I do know one thing – I want whatever it is to be fun and easy.”

They had a deal. For every story Baquet assigned, he’d let Terry pick one. So he told Terry to take his time, poke around for a couple days or a couple weeks, find a story, and then they’d talk.

The next day, Terry picked up his phone to find Baquet on other end.

“I got it,” he said.

“You got what?” Terry asked.

Baquet had a story idea. He told Terry he was the only one, in fact, who could do it.

“This is something editors do,” Terry recalled. “Reporters are really just puppies. All they want is somebody to tickle their bellies, because they are all so stupid.”

The Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal had just broken. Baquet wanted Terry to get the inside story of the prison night shift, the very people who had perpetrated the abuses.

“What part of fun and easy don’t you understand, man?” Terry said. “Jesus. 9-11 was bad enough. But Abu Ghraib is like jumping into a cesspool.”

But he also knew he was the reporter for the job. He was “the guy who gets the guy” to talk when nobody else can. He’d gotten Rafael Perez, the infamous LAPD cop who’d essentially become a gang lord in what became known as the Ramparts scandal. And he’d gotten the hijackers, perhaps the hardest get of all. So he signed up for the story, and sure enough, he got Specialist Charles Graner, the night supervisor from Abu Ghraib, to agree to talk.

But a few weeks later, just as he was preparing to visit Graner in prison in Houston, the prisoner struck a deal with the government that included an agreement not to talk to anyone about what had happened. Three thoughts crossed Terry’s mind: that he was mad, because he’d lost the story; that he was thrilled, because he’d lost the story; and that he’d better find another story before Baquet found one for him.

That was how he found himself in a neuroscience laboratory at the University of California Irvine in December of 2004. He was looking for a story, and within minutes of meeting Gary Lynch, he knew he’d found one.

Terry kept a list of story ideas, some more than a decade old. When he’d worked at the Seattle Times in the 1990s, he used to find himself out in the street, outside the office, with no idea where he’d parked his car. He’d put the story on his list – how do you know, or not, where you park your car? How does memory work? How does it fail?

So he’d made about 20 calls about the current state of memory research, and Lynch’s name kept coming up. Neuroscience, it turned out, was a young science that had not yet answered this fundamental question: how are memories made?

Terry on page six of his book, 101 Theory Drive: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for Memory, recounts his first conversation with Lynch:

“Me: I’m interested in spending time in a laboratory, like yours, where the principal focus is the study of memory. I’d like to explain how memory functions and fails, and why, and use the work in the lab as a means to illustrate how we know what we know.

Lynch: You’d be welcome here. This would actually be a propitious time to be in the lab.

Me: Why’s that?

Lynch: Because we are about to nail this motherfucker to the door.

The reader quickly understands this is going to be a different kind of a science book. Lynch is a different kind of scientist than we are accustomed to encountering in the staid pages of science books – a whiskey-drinking, wide-ranging, hyper-literate genius near the end of three-decade quest aimed at answering some of the fundamental questions regarding the human condition.

And Terry is certainly a different kind of journalist.

Lynch recalled that he asked simply if he could “camp out” in the lab for a while.

“I thought what he meant by camping out was to spend two or three weeks,” Lynch said later. “I mean, obviously, I had no idea the guy is nuts.”

Terry ended up spending the next two years in the lab, bearing witness to perhaps the biggest advance thus far made in our understanding of how memory works. But perhaps just as significantly, he documented the way that science actually works, day-to-day, down in the trenches, where scientists and undergraduate students and post-docs are fodder in a battle dominated much more by failure than success. Their hope is to secure some greater understanding of our world and perhaps, in this case, ourselves.

His reporting would cost him his job and prevent Lynch from getting another job. Neither would regret it an iota.

“I wanted a bloody book, and I got one,” Terry said. “It’s human.”

Memory

I am a writer – albeit a poor, often miserable one, given to horrible deadline struggles and small readerships – in no small part because I read what my brother wrote when I was young.

He is 16 years older than me. My first memories of him are after he’d left our home in Cascade, Iowa, a small town of 1,600 mostly Irish and German Catholics who worship baseball, talk about rain (and especially the lack thereof), grow corn, drink voluminously, and most decidedly do not write books. Terry left for Vietnam when I was still an infant – we come from a family of seven – and the first memory I have of him was of an electric toy car that arrived from Asia one Christmas.

Terry came home from the war and threw himself into college, getting an undergraduate degree in journalism and a master’s degree in urban planning in less than five years at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Through most of college, he also worked at newspapers – beginning as a sophomore at the Omaha World Herald, and later, during his final year of graduate school, as a reporter for the Council Bluffs Nonpareil.

“It was one of those jobs where you work 70 hours a week, so it was weird,” he said. “And of course I got in a fight with the managing editor and quit after a year – a sign of things to come.”

He graduated with no job and went to work as a carpenter for a year.

“It was a framing and siding crew, a three man crew, two of whom smoked dope on the way to work, one whose real fulltime job was as a dope dealer,” he said. “We were always falling off things. It was terrible.”

A classmate from college called with a job offer. His father, an absent-minded but genial Republican named Roger Jepsen, was running for U.S. Senate. He was a political unknown who was given almost no chance of winning.  The idea was they would run the campaign pretty much for the hell of it. Somewhere along the way, Jepsen fired his son, Terry became campaign manager, and a very strange damned thing happened: Jepsen won. The victory was due to an inexplicably low turnout and a series of creatively vicious radio ads (written and ominously voiced by my brother) that tagged his Democratic opponent as “the Senator from Africa” because of his political visits to that continent.

The victory was a shock – to all the McDermotts of Dubuque County, who were uniformly and historically staunch Democrats, to the national press, and especially to my brother. Terry was drunk when Walter Cronkite called for an interview and had to rouse Jepsen from a nap.

After the campaign, he came home for a few days to help my dad shingle our roof. My uncle Raymond, who was Terry’s godfather and a man of very few words, ambled up to the house while everyone was working. He looked up on the roof and saw Terry.

“I hope you fall,” he said, and then ambled off.

Rather than take a job in Washington D.C., he moved to the other side of the county – to Portland, Oregon, where he did some political consulting and worked on a novel. The novel ended up in the fireplace and Terry took a part-time job as a reporter for the Oregon Journal, where he began by covering suburban school boards. He was subsequently hired fulltime and within six months was the paper’s chief correspondent covering state politics. When the paper folded a year later, he was hired by its larger sister publication, the Oregonian.

He became well known within the newsroom for two things: brilliance and bullheadedness. Because of his campaign experience, he understood politics better than most reporters, and he thrived in the high-pressure environment of a legislative session. His encounters with editors were less happy. On his first day on the job at the Oregonian, he got in a screaming match with the editor over the difference between the words slumbering and lumbering. At one point, he’d pissed off his editors so much that they wouldn’t publish his stories. He posted them instead on a bulletin board at the Statehouse in Salem.

“I had that place so wired,” he said. “I had stuff in the paper before it was sent to the caucus. So when they quit putting the stories in the paper, I posted them on this board…the Governor would walk by, ‘Nice piece, Terry.’”

I was a teenager when I first encountered his work. I hadn’t read much journalism beyond the sports pages of the Des Moines Register and the weekly Cascade Pioneer-Advertiser, but something set his stories apart. I wouldn’t be able to articulate it until much later, but there were people in them – not just names and quotes, but real, live, cursing, bleeding, funny, fulminating, pontificating, goofy, passionate, smart, boneheaded flesh and blood people.

“What I always wanted was a more natural style of newspaper writing,” Terry said. “I didn’t want it to look like it had come out of a machine.”

Terry moved on to the Seattle Times in 1985 and began making a bigger name for himself. In Oregon, he’d begun pushing the envelope of what newspaper journalism could do. He’d published a series on the refugees from Southeast Asia – a project on which he met his future wife, Millie Quan, who edited the stories and whose ambition was likewise outsized for the small market newspaper world.

In Seattle, he blossomed. He began with a four part series that told the story of a pliers – the economics, that is, of how $8 factory pliers became a $640 pliers in a Defense Department contract for a Boeing airplane. It was a classic investigative piece, but he made it into something more. He followed the pliers from the factory to the plane through the contract to the Pentagon, and illuminated staggering complexity of military contracting. For most reporters, this would have been a simple “gotcha” story. Terry used the pliers to construct a narrative that told a much larger, more complicated story.

In 1989, Terry wrote what amounted to his first book, only it was contained, barely, within five editions of the Seattle Times. It ran at about 40,000 words and told the story of the building of a single high rise in downtown Seattle. Each part of the series took up most of an entire section of the paper.

“That was fun,” Terry said. “I loved that. You know, that first piece was 9,349 words, and it didn’t even get to what it was supposed to be about. It was supposed to be about this building, the building of a building, and it was basically an urban history of commercial Seattle.”

Everything was in there: the architect, drawing his initial sketch on a restaurant napkin; the developers, buying, selling, scheming and dreaming; the construction workers, hanging on for dear life, transforming sketches into reality hundreds of feet off the ground; the digging of a very large hole; the mechanics, economics, and pure wonder of skyscrapers; and even a brief discourse, at the very beginning of part two, on the history of horse manure and city streets.

The story was a hit. It took something everybody in Seattle saw every day – the skyline – and gave it a narrative.

“It was revelatory, I think,” Terry said. “I made people look at downtown Seattle in a different way, gave people a greater appreciation of things.  I liked the idea of taking something everyone thought they understood and took for granted and exploring the richness of it in a way they didn’t think was possible, to find things they didn’t know were there.”

He remembers speaking at a gathering of investigative reporters around this time and telling them they had it all wrong.

“The premise they begin with when doing that type of investigative work is to take something really complicated and make it simple,” he said. “What I said is that what we really need to do is take something simple and make it complicated. That is what I liked. I was obviously fucked.”

Lynch’s lab

My brother and Gary Lynch are cut from the same cloth.

Terry refers to himself as a “smart peasant.” We are from a long line of farming people, few who ever made it to college.  “Smartass peasant” might be a more apt description – particularly, in regards to Terry, if you were to ask an even longer line of embattled editors. But he has utter confidence in his ability to deliver a story, regardless of the odds. He also has a disturbing tendency to be right in most matters not involving baseball or women.

Lynch, like Terry, roams far afield from within the astonishingly broad confines of his own mind. He comes from a working class, Irish family from Delaware who weren’t exactly the encouraging sorts – his own father called him by the wrong name, Mike, all his childhood for reasons unknown but most likely involving pure orneriness.

Lynch has been pursuing the most unlikely story in the world for nearly four decades: the story of how the human brain works. More specifically, he has been seeking the biological underpinnings of how memory is encoded in the brain, or put in more simple terms: a physical trace, a fleshly piece of evidence that memory does indeed tangibly exist.

As Terry writes in 101 Theory Drive, this is a pursuit that has consumed several scientific careers, fruitlessly. Most famously, psychologist Karl Lashley spent much of his life hunting for what he called “an engram.”  Though his search was unsuccessful, he died in 1958 believing that such physical proof of memory had to exist, somewhere.

“Of course, Lashley’s original impulse had been right,” Terry writes.  “It had to be. If memory left no mark, then there could be no such thing as memory, no such thing as a personal past, no learning, no store of intimate and exotic knowledge. And if not that, then how to explain your sudden blinding reminiscence on that day in seventh grade when you dove headlong for the loose ball and crashed nose first into the bleachers and the pain was so sharp and bright you thought you had broken your brain, or the dense, long evening in the summer of the next year when you kissed Sharon Connelly, and she kissed back? If these things had truly happened, if you knew them to be true and had kept each in its own special place all that while, there was memory and it had only to be excavated from wherever it lie. Where was that place?  What did it look like? Half a century after Lashley, nobody knew.”

We – at least those of us not well-versed in science – tend to underestimate the persistence of mystery. Few people outside neuroscience can appreciate just how little we know about the human brain. This is no idle matter. As Terry notes, we are on the verge of a “dementia pandemic.” By 2050, an estimated 100 million people will suffer from neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimers, Huntington’s, and Parkinson’s. In 2009 the Medicare budget for Alzheimer’s alone was $160 billion. Left unsolved, it will reach $1 trillion by 2050.

When Terry arrived in Lynch’s lab in December, 2004, the neuroscientist thought he was within weeks or maybe months of finally proving of what he’d long hypothesized was the locus of memory – a cellular process in the hippocampus called Long Term Potentiation, or LTP.  He was also simultaneously working on the development of a drug that could potentially address cognitive deficiencies associated with memory failure.

Lynch had read Terry’s terrorism work.  It was part of what convinced him to let Terry into the lab.

“I would have not just let anybody walk into my lab,” Lynch said. “But the stuff he’s done is all in-depth writing – he tends to get deep into it. I didn’t realize what he was interested in was being around when ‘it’ happened….In fact, I’m not even sure his primary interest was in this material – maybe he thought it was at the beginning, but it became apparent to me that he was interested in the process. How does it actually look? Who are these people? Why are they doing it, and what does it work like? So yeah I figured the guy was going to come down for a couple of weeks and write a science article about memory and what is going on in that field. So it was fine having him here. Then, I am afraid, he got caught in my ambitions.”

Lynch’s ambitions were greater than what would already be a staggering, game-changing, Nobel-caliber discovery. As he later noted at an event at the Los Angeles Library shortly after the book was released last spring, Lynch was after the biggest human mystery of all. It had been the pursuit of his lifetime and he was at its cusp: he wanted to provide a map of thought itself.

“There is a thing called thought, a thing called consciousness,” he said. “And when you say what is thought, what are we? What is in that inner world as opposed to that outer world? That is the question for me. What is it? So the thing that I perceived, and still think, was blocking memory, and blocking progress …was there was no biological description of thought.”

Beyond the scientific quest, Lynch himself was enthralling as a subject.

“He was as apt to quote Cormac McCarthy as Gregor Mendel,” Terry wrote. “He made on-the-fly references to, among many other things, left- handed relief pitchers, Moses, British naval history, the stock market, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Maxwell’s equations, the ur-city of Ur, Darwin, Dylan, Kant, Chomsky, Bush, Titian, field theory, drag-racing, his father’s perpetual habit of calling him — intentionally — by the wrong name, his career as a gas jockey at an all-night service station, Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg, Caesar crossing the Rubicon, and the search for the historical Jesus.”

As Christine Gall, Lynch’s frequent collaborator and longtime significant other, told Terry: “Gary just has more RAM than other people. He can access lateral information that most people can’t. It isn’t like he has to think and remind himself. It’s right there. He has access to it. To have that available to inform you, to make the next cognitive leap — that’s his strength.”

Perfect soldiers

I arrived in Manhattan Beach on Sept. 10, 2001, after jumping off a sinking fishing boat in Alaska, fleeing two years to Ireland to live with a Gaelic soap opera actress and her two sisters, returning to fish one last season up North, and then stopping to see my brother and his family en route back to Ireland. Terry and I were drinking coffee in his kitchen on the morning of Sept. 11.

Minutes after the second tower was hit, Terry left for the Times downtown In later years, after the editorial staff was reduced from 1,200 to 600 people, he would remember the moment he walked into the newspaper’s office. It was a vast, humming, information gathering machine sprung fully into action.

The structural engineer who’d worked on the World Trade Center, John Skilling, had also worked on the building Terry wrote about in Seattle. He had since passed, but Terry was on the phone with the CEO of his engineering firm when the first tower collapsed.

“He was actually pretty proud up until then,” Terry said. “The building did its job, he said. It caught the airplanes, staggered and stood up. We were both watching on TV while we talked. He almost fainted when the first tower went down.”

Two weeks later, editor Dean Baquet assigned Terry to find out who the terrorists were, and why they did it. Baquet knew going in that hundreds of thousands of dollars would be spent sending his reporter around the world in search of answers that might not be obtainable.

Baquet, now an editor with the New York Times, said there were several reasons he chose Terry for the job.

“What Terry had coming into this thing not every reporter has is that, first of all, he is almost a novelist as a writer,” Baquet said. “He writes literature, in a lot of ways, and I knew this was not purely an investigative story. We knew generally what happened by that time – we knew here were guys who were angry enough at America to do this…I figured it would be a story about the lives of these guys.”

“Second is Terry gets on a subject and does not let it go. He does whatever it takes, learns whatever he has to learn, goes that extra mile. He can’t let go of a subject, and if ever there was a subject – I wanted somebody really deep on this, because this was the story of a lifetime. That is why I picked him. And he delivered it. It reads like literature, but it’s also the best reporting done on the plot.”

Terry often describes reporting as 90 percent “hanging out.” He quotes the writer Raymond Carver’s description of of a writer’s job as essentially remaining at his or her station.

The first of the four stories he wrote about the 9-11 terrorists was about Mohamed Atta, the purported leader of 9-11 terrorists.  This took him first to Egypt, where after an almost entirely unsuccessful month in Cairo he finally found Atta’s family. He later went to Germany, where Atta studied and apparently became radicalized. A German “fixer” – reporting assistants who help foreign correspondents navigate their way through different cultures – was assigned to Terry. Dirk Laabs was in his mid-20s and had never witnessed anything like Terry at work on a story. Laabs, who is now considered one of the finest young reporters in Germany, calls Terry his “Jedi” master.

“Terry is my Obi Wan,” he said.

The first thing he learned, Laabs said, was the “Don’t you fucking no no no me” rule.

“We were researching the Atta story,” he said. “Especially the first weeks were very hard. Every file is secret in Germany. We got hardly anywhere. Finally, we learned that Atta sued his university. We hoped that his first address in Hamburg would be in the court files. He said: ‘Let’s go over to the court.’ I said: ‘No, no, no, they won’t talk to us, this is Germany. Courts don’t give addresses to reporters.’”

They went to the court. They got the address, which led to a treasure trove of information.

“What I learned from this: the biggest problem for a reporter – the boundaries in your own head,” Laabs said. “Don’t think about what couldn’t work, just do it, check it, research it.”

The reporting started early and ended late. Laabs was disturbed to realize it didn’t allow for much eating.

“When I first met him, we worked all day, he ate only an apple at the hotel room, and I thought: I’m fucked,” he recalled. “Later I was more confident and told him, if you want me to function, you have to feed me.”

They staked out houses. Terry read books about Hamburg, trying to recreate the foreign world Atta found himself in. They went to mosques, found classmates, former co-workers. In one instance, they were denied access to information by the manager of an apartment complex where Atta had lived. They were looking for his roommates. Finally, Dirk, Terry, and their Arabic translator showed up at the man’s office, all dressed in black, and said simply, “Show us the file.” It couldn’t hurt to ask, Terry reasoned.

“Everybody who had commented on Atta to that point barely knew him, yet he had lived in this one room for seven years with two different guys,” he said. “Anyhow, I decided we should make one last effort – show up unannounced, all three of us march in, stand over [his] desk and demand to see the file.”

“Give them to us now and we will leave you alone,” Terry told the man, with Laabs translating into German.

The man opened his desk, pulled out a file, and handed it over. He said he hoped Washington would now leave him alone.

As a result, they found his former roommates, who described Atta as a small, querulous young man who had a strong disdain for women and was offended by a print of a Degas nude hanging in the apartment. A roommate later hung a poster of Miss Piggy dressed in scanty negligee in the apartment’s common bathroom to further antagonize him.

“At one point, when you have talked to enough people, even a dead man becomes three dimensional, becomes alive, once you heard many consistent stories about him,” Laabs said.

Much of what was being reported in the media up to that point had been wrong: Atta, it turned out, was entirely unremarkable except for what he had done.

In the Times article called “Perfect Soldier,” Terry described the girlfriend of one of Atta’s former German roommates watching 9-11 and its aftermath unfold:

“Watching the explosions, she would try to match them, the war, everything that has gone on in the world since Sept. 11, to her memory of the slight young man padding around his student apartment in his shower shoes. It didn’t fit. She would ask herself: All of this because of Mohamed? It’s impossible, she said. Not little Mohamed in his blue flip-flops.

There is much about Atta we can’t now know. But when a person moves through the world, he leaves a path that can be traced, however faint parts of it may be. Down in the Atta traces, the image that lingers is of a man who was far too small to accomplish the huge thing he did. This was a man too timid even to knock on a professor’s open office door. There is something deeply unsatisfying about this. We want our monsters to be monstrous. We expect them to be somehow equal to their crimes. More than anything, we want them to be extraordinary, to allow us to think the horrible thing itself is unlikely to be repeated.

When we go looking for people capable of inflicting such great destruction, the last thing we expect to find is little Mohamed in his blue flip-flops.”

At one point after the 9-11 stories had appeared, Terry spoke before a group of businessmen. They were curious about how the reporting was financed. The expense of his reporting alone, Terry estimated, was at least $400,000.

“How does that cost out?” one man asked.

The answer, of course, is that it didn’t. Newspapers formerly spent huge amounts of resources on stories that might never be fleshed out, and even when they did –as this one did – they didn’t pay for themselves though additional sales.

The L.A. Times parent company, The Tribune Co., is now in bankruptcy. Baquet said that if the events of 9-11 had occurred today, those stories would likely not be assigned.

“It’s too bad,” Baquet said. “Fewer and fewer newspapers would devote resources to stories like that. I don’t think the L.A. Times would do it today, which breaks my heart.”

“You know, in a way, of course it doesn’t cost out – if I tried to sit down with an accountant and prove here is why it was worth taking this much time,” Baquet added. “But it costs out morally.”

Out on Theory Drive

Gary Lynch fought his battle with rat brains and graduate students.

Improbably, 20 years after he’d essentially been discounted by what was then mainstream neuroscience, his hypothesis turned out to be correct. Memory was encoded through the process of LTP. He proved it over the course of two years of experiments – conducted mainly by a motley crew of students, using tiny slices of rat brains — Terry witnessed firsthand.

Lynch said he’s not sure Terry could possibly understand how lucky he was to be at the right place at this particular time. Lynch’s triumph had included decades of uncertainty, at best, and abject failure, at worst.

“In my head this guy comes down here and I tell him we will shortly make this discovery that will nail down what a sizable portion of neuroscience has been chasing for a long, long time,” Lynch said. “We are going to get it and work it out. And it didn’t happen in two weeks. But we did nail the motherfucker.”

It was a signature moment in the history of neuroscience, which almost nobody outside the field noticed. Lynch’s lab was not alone in its work on LTP, but it was at the very forefront of what will likely result in a Nobel Prize.

“The Nobel committee, like the Dark Lord, sends out scouts on the road, and they’ve been out on the road for a few years talking to people about LTP,” Terry said.  “There has to be a prize for LTP, and if you don’t give it to Lynch, it’s hard to imagine who you give it to. Nobody has contributed more.”

UCLA neuroscientist Alcino Silva told Terry that this advancement in the understanding of how the human brain works should be considered among the greatest scientific accomplishments.

“There is a quote in the book where Silva says nobody understands what we have done,” Terry said. “In the 1990s and 2000s, he says, the field, led by Lynch, has discovered what human memory is. And nobody knows they’ve done it. Think about it, Silva says: that is Newtonian, that is Einsteinian great. And it really is. It’s an enormous achievement. I think the fact that it is dispersed over many people over 30 years obscures what they did, and they wouldn’t have done it if Lynch wasn’t there, because most people quit on it. He didn’t.”

Terry turned in the story late in the summer of 2006. It was copy-edited and scheduled to run by November. And then Baquet, who’d authorized the story, was fired in October. The new editors lacked enthusiasm for the story. First, they said it would have to wait – there was no space until the first of the year. January came and went. Nothing happened. Terry had to ask: what’s up with the story?

There are some problems with it, an editor responded – namely, there’s too much science.

That’s kind of the point, Terry said.

In February, the new editor gave Terry a drastically changed version. Terry, as he is wont to do, drew a line in the sand. “Look,” he said. “Your conception and mine are so different, I just can’t imagine them being reconciled. And I won’t have it published with my name on it with all the science gone, and all the narrative gone. I just won’t agree to that.” Okay, the editor said. And the story went into a drawer, where it sat for months. Meanwhile, Terry signed a book deal to write an expanded version of the story. A few months later, the story was resurrected by another editor. It appeared, finally, in August of that year. It eventually won two of the most prestigious prizes in science journalism – from the American Society for the Advancement of Science and the Wistar Institute.

But the articles also had some less than positive impacts. Lynch had been close to signing on with a new, well-funded laboratory. After the stories came out officials told him he wouldn’t be a good fit. The portrait of the lab was a little too vividly human – with fits of pique, Irish whiskey, long hours, bad food, occasional bitter feuds, and very colorful language all on full display.

“They said, ‘Well, that is not really our kind of environment, not our kind of way of doing things,” Lynch said. “I said, ‘You know, there are moments in there where this guy is actually hitting literature-land, okay? You should stand back from it – there are moments in there where he is really clocking along and it reads as literature. To me, I don’t mean it’s just scientific exposition or that it’s, you know, tales of the mad hatter – it’s coming on as standalone literature just as material to read that is interesting and novel and provocative. And Christ, wouldn’t you want to promote that? Wouldn’t you want your lab to be a part of that kind of thing?’ That is an argument that doesn’t go very far with many people. But to me, it’s very real.”

USC neuroscientist Larry Swanson, a Manhattan Beach resident and one of the foremost brain anatomy experts in the world, defended the reporting on the very grounds others in the scientific community took offense.

“It’s the story of one person’s tenacity and how he managed to sort of galvanize a whole group of young people to help him get to that goal,” Swanson said. “And it shows the process of science, the real process…That is what I love about it. It’s a year in the life of a lab, and it’s fairly typical of the way things are in a science lab. Different leaders have different styles, of course, but there are some fairly universal things Terry captured in the way science is done in the U.S. now. It’s an amazing snapshot that I think is valuable historically – looking back years from now, this is how research was done and how a lot of progress was made in figuring out how the brain works.”

Lynch has no regrets.

“Maybe that is one of the reasons Terry and I got along, because we both have this property of saying the mob is wrong most of the time,” he said. “I mean, it’s true. I have never before seen a history of my business that caught that point. You take any slice of time, any two year period in the 30 years I’ve been doing this, and at that point in time most of the ideas were wrong about this memory encoding process, flat wrong. And most of them are wrong right now.

“That was the big point about the two of us that was something that was really evident from day zero,” he added. “That and the fact that he likes to drink and got along with my bartenders. What more can you ask?”

Terry, meanwhile, was fired by the L.A. Times in September 2008. He was told that he was a luxury the paper could no longer afford. His work did not cost out.

“It probably got me fired in the end,” he said.  “So you pay for your good luck.”

101 Theory Drive came out last April. He has since signed two more book deals, one about the 9-11 terrorist mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and another about the history of a baseball pitch, the change-up.

“Somebody told me that everything I wrote tended to be about baseball or my father,” Terry said. “Well, that can’t be true and I don’t think it is. I’ve written just two books and I was trying figure out what they had in common. The obvious thing is they both have something to do with what goes on inside people’s heads. In the case of the hijackers, what caused them, what motivated them, why they did what they did. And in 101 Theory it has to do with memory, obviously, and how they are made in your head. But it has more to do actually with belief – Lynch’s belief in himself and the power of science against pretty long odds.

“So I mean, for myself, I got really lucky, on the one hand, that I was there, that this is the lab I ended up in, and I was there at the sort of end of the path, because I could summarize the whole 30 years. Plus, he serves good whiskey.” B

See here for more information and for articles by Terry McDermott

See here for the LA Library “How Memories Are Made” event, moderated by Manhattan Beach resident and neuroscientist Larry Swanson, at which McDermott and Lynch discuss 101 Theory Drive.

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