In Search of the Silver Bullet

By Charles Krauthammer

A county medical examiner in Florida, it seems, will no longer be supplying the brains--or more accurately, pieces of the brains--of executed prisoners to a University of Florida researcher for her studies on the criminal mind. News of this exchange has stirred a small scandal. The prisoners, it turns out, never consented to be so studied. But the deeper question is what could the study have possibly hoped to find?

In our age, which has learned to quantify everything, perhaps it might not seem strange that the soul of a killer should be sought in his posthumous neuroanatomy. In an age of scientific miracles, every field of human endeavor looks to science for the silver bullet to pierce the heart of a problem. Why not the heart of evil?

After all, for decades scientists and others have been ransacking the brain for the soul of an equally mysterious power: genius. Perhaps the most famous case is Einstein. Slices of his brain were recently pored over by a pair of California neuroscientists. More revealing of the bizarre possibilities of this kind of scientific quest is the case of Lenin. In 1925 the Soviets, applying a socialist definition of genius, entrusted his brain to a German neurologist, Oskar Vogt. The idea, explains Psychiatrist Walter Reich, was "to establish an institute in Moscow entirely devoted to the purpose of discovering the 'materialist' (that is, 'physical') basis for Lenin's political and philosophical genius." Two years and 34,000 slices later, Vogt found, and the Journal of the American Medical Association reported, a "large number of paths proceeding from the pyramidal cells [triangular nerve cells in the cerebral cortex]." These were taken to explain "the wide range and the multiplicity of ideas that developed in the brain of Lenin and, particularly, his capacity for quickly getting his bearings when confronted with the most complex situations and problems ..." Conclusion? "The key to a materialistic view of Lenin's genius has been found."

Materialistic is a Marxist term and, in the context of this lunatic search for Lenin's "genius," a kind one. A better word is reductionist: there is no better example of scientific reductionism than to look for--let alone to pretend to have found--the source of Lenin's powers in the pyramidal cells of his brain. Even if one were to concede that in principle, and in some far-off century, psychology will be reducible to anatomy, science will hardly give us the key to evil and genius, which are, after all, not physical but cultural phenomena. The problem is one of categories. Was Lenin a genius? Who is to say? In another culture, perhaps, a case could be made that the brain of the man who introduced terror as a routine instrument of governance is to be studied for insights into criminality.

A resistance to reductionism, however, does not warrant taking refuge in scientific Luddism, the view that science has nothing at all to tell us about human personality. It does have something to say, though that something is very limited.

The analogy has been made that trying to understand the mind by physical means is like trying to understand the meaning of a television program by examining the wiring of the set. Now this is not a totally crazy idea. Some defects--say, a failure of the horizontal hold or a lacuna in the screen--are indeed caused by the hardware. Analogously, study of the physical brain has much to offer in our trying to understand stereotypic behavioral aberrations (the automatic movements of epilepsy, for example, or the hallucinations of schizophrenia) and noncomplex behaviors (for example, left-and right-handedness).

But genius? Evil? A giant leap, a leap of faith, is required to assume that the road to understanding them runs through the neuronal substructure of the brain. It is as if a Martian set out to make sense of Alexis and Blake by breaking open a Sony.

There is a larger problem, however. It is not just the mind doctors who dream of drawing straight lines between the physical and human worlds. Everyone looks to science for the silver bullet, the idea that can resolve the unresolvable and reduce the irreducible at a single stroke. Consider:

The President proposes to cut through the fearful paradoxes and terrors of nuclear deterrence with a Star Wars program to make "nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete." (In fact, like most scientific "solutions," a Star Wars defense, even if feasible, would raise more questions--about countermeasures, arms control, non-ballistic technologies--than it would answer.)

Senator Jesse Helms, attempting to outlaw abortion "scientifically," introduces a bill stating, "The Congress finds that present-day scientific evidence indicates a significant likelihood that actual human life exists from conception." Science would succeed where politics and moral argument had failed; it would pierce the conundrum of abortion and yield an incontrovertible answer. (In fact, science is in principle incapable of doing so: the very idea of "actual human life" or "personhood" is a political and not a scientific notion.)

The Pentagon proposes to cut down on disloyalty and leaks by massively expanding the use of a machine with the power to divine truth and falsity. A monument to scientific credulity, it carries the name lie detector. (In fact, the machine is little more than a sweat detector. It also senses breathing, pulse and blood pressure. If it measures anything, it measures anxiety.)

There is something touching and terribly human about our belief in the powers of science. Its roots, of course, are deeper and older than science. The longing to penetrate the impenetrable is ancient. Satisfying that longing was once the mission assigned to magic, then religion. As these have declined, the task has devolved upon science. Science has much to offer the world in machinery and ideas. But it is too much to ask of it (and too little to ask of ourselves) to discover the key to murder and genius and to distinguish truth from lies.

Even aesthetically, science leaves something to be desired. Today we hook wires to the skin and study squiggly lines, looking for transmitted truth. Three thousand years before the lie detector, it was in the Urim and Thummim, sacred stones in the breastplate of the biblical high priest, that truth was to be found. They glowed, says the historian Josephus, in patterns expressing oracular truth. And the wiring, to on high, was totally invisible. Now that was a machine. --By Charles Krauthammer