Chasing Memory

One man's epic quest for understanding

This four-part series won the AAAS and Wistar science writing awards for 2008 and is the basis of the book.

Here's what the AAAS announcement said:

AAAS Announces Winners of the 2008 AAAS Science Journalism Awards

An ambitious series on memory and the brain, a look at whether research supports widespread use of anti-cholesterol medications, and a broadcast account of the contentious battle over intelligent design in Dover, Pennsylvania, are among the winners of the 2008 AAAS Science Journalism Awards from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

The contest, established in 1945, honors excellence in science reporting for print, radio, television and online categories. . . .

The judges praised McDermott*s ambitious, meticulously reported series on memory and the brain. McDermott described the efforts of neuroscientist Gary Lynch to answer such fundamental questions as: What happens in our brain when we encounter a new experience so that we can recall it at will tonight, tomorrow or in 2025? And what goes wrong when we can*t remember? Andrew Revkin of The New York Times said the series *exploring the mysteries of memory and the meandering pathways at the frontiers of understanding was a superb example of narrative science journalism.* Peter Spotts of the The Christian Science Monitor called it a *captivating, inside look at cutting-edge science, with all the triumphs and setbacks -- and personal conflicts.*

Illustration by Leslie Carlson, LAT

Chasing Memory:  

First of Four Parts

One man's epic quest for understanding
Gary Lynch has spent decades trying to understand how the brain processes new information so that we can recall it later.
By Terry McDermott
Times Staff Writer

August 19, 2007

The first time I spoke with the neuroscientist Gary Lynch, the conversation went something like this:

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 to come here. This would actually be a propitious time to be in the lab.

Me: Why's that?

Lynch: Because we're about to nail this mother to the door.
Lynch is a neuroscientist at UC Irvine, where he has spent 37 years trying to uncover the biochemical mechanisms of memory.

He has, for almost the length of his career, been trying to answer essentially a single pair of questions: What happens in the brain when a human being encounters a new experience so that he or she can recall it at will tonight, tomorrow, in 2025? And what goes wrong when we can't remember?

This second question has in the last several years taken on great weight.

We are on the verge of a dementia pandemic. It is estimated that by 2040, 100 million people worldwide will suffer from Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's, Parkinson's or some other form of dementia. Science has been able to do precious little to combat these diseases, in large part because the understanding of the underlying cognitive processes has been meager. Thousands of scientists have spent countless years seeking and largely failing to unearth the secrets within the human brain.

Medical advances have allowed more and more people to live longer but have been unable to relieve longevity of its principal bane -- the breakdown of mental processes, especially memory. When memory loss occurs, it seldom fails to impress upon its victims and those who know them the extent to which our memories constitute our selves.

That breakdowns occur is not surprising. Consider: You're 50 years old. What's your time in the 100-yard dash? How does that compare to the 18-year-old you? Why would your brain be exempt from declining in analogous ways? It isn't. So much goes wrong so often that many malfunctions are considered ordinary and are often referred to collectively as normal cognitive decline.

Before that first conversation with Lynch, I already knew that he had been an often polarizing figure in his field, that he had a reputation for being pugnacious, and that he had been uncannily right about a lot of things over a very long time.

In the subsequent two years, I spent a great deal of time in his lab. I spoke with the other scientists who worked there and observed their experiments; I read papers they and others published; I learned how to perform some of the most rudimentary tasks of their basic experiments. But what I did mostly was talk to Lynch. Or, more to the point, listen as Lynch explained mammalian biology and brain science.

Listening to Lynch often entailed following swooping, exhilarating flights over time and intellectual terrain. Bear with me, he sometimes said, this might not seem connected to what we've been talking about, but it will circle back. Ten, 20 or 30 minutes later, often after side trips to ancient Rome or Yankee Stadium or Bismarck's Germany, it did.

Lynch almost always spoke in such a way that his huge ambition, self-regard and lack of pretense were vividly displayed. He was unreserved, witty, juvenile, insightful and learned in ways that were surprising. He was as apt to quote Cormac McCarthy as Gregor Mendel. 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.

Christine Gall, Lynch's frequent collaborator and longtime significant other, said: "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."

That leaping ability has earned Lynch as much trouble as reward. He never shies from proclamation based on his intuitions, nor from criticizing those not privy to his insight. "That is what amazes me," he said. "People will walk in who are very sensible and intelligent biologists and tell you, 'Memory is this.' And you go, 'How in the hell could it possibly be that? I didn't think it was that when I was back at Our Lady of Fatima Grade School. I mean, I didn't think it was that when I was working at the all-night gas station. For crying out loud!' "

One result of this perhaps excessive straightforwardness has been a constant war with the neuroscience establishment, with university administrators and colleagues at Irvine. But whatever his difficulties, Lynch has slogged along, making hard progress documented in more than 550 published papers, some of which are considered classic and are among the most frequently cited works in all of neuroscience.

As a corollary to his basic research, Lynch has sought ways to counter the various afflictions that erode the brain's abilities. Working with chemist Gary Rogers, he invented a new class of drugs called ampakines, which, if they worked, would not only improve memory, but would make the brain perform better in numerous other ways. Drugs of this sort, called cognitive enhancers or, more simply, smart pills, have been the Holy Grail of brain research for a century.

Like much contemporary drug research, ampakine development has been slow going, but by the time I met Lynch, versions of his drugs were being considered by the Food and Drug Administration for a series of clinical trials, which should largely determine whether their substantial promise could be fulfilled. Success would be a signal moment in neuroscience history.

By chance, the ampakine drug trials would get underway at the same time the memory research in his lab seemed headed toward its own finale. Lynch had a sense that answers he had spent a career chasing were at hand.

He was alternately eager at the opportunity and despondent at the likelihood of failure. He knew, as every research scientist does, that almost everything almost always goes wrong. If, over time, science can be viewed as the steady extinction of ignorance, in the near term, on most days, ignorance wins hands down.

"If you're good, if you're any good at all, you put yourself in a situation where reality could come around and -- WHACK! -- knock you down. That's what you really are afraid of. If you don't have that, you're not playing science," Lynch said.

He was definitely playing science now. With the drug research and the fast-approaching end to his torturous journey in what he once characterized as a gulag of unyielding biology, he had a rare opportunity -- a shot on goal, he called it.

"Come to the lab," he said. "This could get interesting."

Lynch Lab

Save for lynch, Lynch Lab was empty just before New Year's 2005. Much to Lynch's chagrin, everyone was vacationing.

The lab had just developed a new technique that he thought would allow researchers to visualize the physical trace of memories, and in doing so resolve long-standing, fundamental debates in neuroscience.

This new technique promised to answer conclusively what had been supposition, and to answer it in such a way that you would literally see the result. And people went on vacation?

Most of the space in Lynch Lab was taken up by two parallel ranks of standard lab benches, complete with faucets, hoses, beakers, stocks of chemicals, pipettes, scales, reference books and undergraduates. Lynch and the lab's senior scientists had offices on the perimeter, but most of the experimental work was done out on the benches.

Lynch could almost always be found in his office, writing or reading, and chewing on a cigar if he had one or a plastic cafeteria fork if he didn't. No matter whose name was on them, almost all of the journal papers that issued from the lab were written by him.

He has an open, almost guileless face, so helplessly expressive that your first impulse is to invite him to a poker game. The years have begun to accumulate, however, cutting deep lines. He is about 6 feet tall, rail-thin but for the beginnings of a belly, with tangled, graying hair that has relaxed considerably from its Charlie Manson heyday. He usually dresses in high-quality, untucked, casual clothes -- Klein, Boss and Zegna shirts and jeans and well-worn chukka boots.

His corner office is spare and clean -- a large glass-top, metal-frame desk; a dual-monitor Mac workstation; a few potted plants along broad, undraped windows. He has a telephone on his desk, but it is often unplugged. He sometimes goes for weeks without reading e-mail. The only decorations on the walls are a single small plaque honoring him because his papers were so often cited by other scientists, and a pair of large abstract paintings of brain interiors, which are mostly purple and surprisingly pleasant.

Except for a congregation of Starbucks decaf cups, he is fastidious. There is almost never more than a single pen and a pad of paper on the desktop; he keeps a spray bottle of glass cleaner handy to scrub it, which he does religiously. He usually has a bottle of whiskey and a brace of glasses stowed among the plants. Before serving, he scrubs the glasses with the same care he applies to the desk.

The duties of a university scientist leading his own lab are manifold. Foremost, the existence of the lab depends on his ability to fund it. He is an employee of the university, but also a profit center. He must attract grants, from which the university takes a significant cut, to pay the basic expenses of his laboratory: salaries, equipment, supplies.

The overwhelming majority of grant money comes from the federal government, most through the National Institutes of Health. The competition for money is intense and often leaves normally placid scientists swearing like deckhands. Lynch, whose lab has been funded mostly by the federal government at around $1 million per year for decades, was no exception.

In part because of the constant threat of extinction, neuroscience labs -- even those that don't have Lynch in them -- are not the happiest places. There is tension and fear and jealousy and a near-constant sense that careers are about to be made or, more commonly, missed. Such fraught situations call for careful, considered management.

Due to a lack of interest, or possibly ability, which can be the same thing, Lynch seemed to run his lab like a man on a midnight beer run, running pell-mell down the aisle, throwing things, many of them unhealthful, into the cart and hoping there would be enough for everybody when he got back to the house.

Which is to say, although it was obvious to him, it wasn't always clear to others what Lynch was up to.

In addition to providing money, the lead scientist, in the academic world called the principal investigator, is the intellectual leader of the team. Lynch did very few experiments himself, but designed, assigned or approved virtually all of what everyone else did. He would hate to admit it, but he was a dictator.

The 'free-ride guy'

The youngest son in a disintegrating Irish Catholic working-class family in Wilmington, Del., Lynch earned scholarships to Catholic high school, then -- "always a free-ride guy" -- the University of Delaware.

The ride ended abruptly when he was kicked out for partying. He worked odd jobs until he was readmitted. Because Lynch's main interest in college was to have a good time, something had to change. When he came back, he changed majors from engineering to psychology for, he said, two reasons -- engineering students spent weekends building electric circuits and, as important, there were very few girls among them. Lynch chose psychology, he said, because there were plenty of girls and no weekend work.

Lynch, in spite of his professed laziness, excelled and earned a graduate scholarship to Princeton, where he quickly determined he was much more interested in mucking around inside the head than standing outside it and asking questions.

He earned his doctorate in psychology in 1968, just three years after enrolling. Soon after, he received a job offer from UC Irvine. The university was so new it hadn't yet graduated its first class.

The offer was to teach in the psychobiology department. Lynch had not completed a single college course in biology. (Too many details, he said.) He had never been to California. But one of the first of those now ubiquitous lists of the best universities had been recently published. UC Berkeley ranked No. 1 in the world.

"The thrill I felt was -- it's the people's university," said Lynch. "That's a public university. Oxford, Cambridge are down here; Harvard's down here; Princeton's down here. The best university in the world is a public university. I thought, 'Man, we are so on the right track.' That inspired me. . . . I thought, 'This is it; this is finally it.' In the face of people working on great things together in the sunshine, in the eternal summer of California, privilege falls away. What could be more beautiful?"

Irvine then was not far removed from its ranch-land past. There were cattle grazing on the hills above the campus and cowboys chasing them. Almost overnight, the university became a center of brain research.

Neuroscience, too, was young, and there was a sense broadly shared that the human brain, one of the great frontiers of science, was about to be colonized -- although from what direction or by whose army was unclear. Biologists, chemists, anatomists, psychologists, mathematicians, even philosophers and physicists, all suddenly calling themselves neuroscientists, plunged into the field. No one knew where they were going, and no one wanted to be left behind.

Memory as a subject of inquiry and wonder is as old, perhaps, as man. The ancient Greeks variously proposed that memory and other mental processes were a function of the heart, the lungs or the brain, which eventually became the agreed-upon site. Beyond locale, however, little was learned about the processes of mental activity for the next 2,000 years.

Although the great Spanish anatomist Santiago Ramon y Cajal proposed in the late 19th century that the brain was composed of tiny cells called neurons and that memory might be stored at connections between neurons, there were plenty of scientists who thought the whole mental apparatus too ineffable, too mysterious a subject to yield to laboratory examination.

The seminal event in the modern history of memory research occurred by accident in 1953. In an effort to stop horrific epileptic seizures afflicting a young Connecticut man, a neurosurgeon named William Scoville removed a portion of the man's brain. The surgery stopped the seizures but rendered the man, known in the literature as H.M., incapable of forming new memories. His memory of events before the surgery was uninhibited.

A main portion of the brain that Scoville removed was a temporal lobe structure called the hippocampus. The fact that H.M. could no longer form memories but could recall older ones suggested strongly that the hippocampus was crucial to making but not storing memory. It immediately made the hippocampus the central focus of memory research, a position it had maintained when Lynch, just 26, arrived in Irvine in 1969.

Lynch was wild-eyed, bushy-haired and bearded, a man of his time -- a bit too fully, perhaps. It was the '60s, it was Southern California, land of eternal light and endless good times. Lynch lived in a party pad on Balboa Island.

By every account, including his own, Lynch ate badly, drank heavily and slept hardly at all. There were days he seemed to consume more cigars than calories.

"Gary doesn't sleep," said Michel Baudry, a 10-year veteran of Lynch's lab. "He's incredible. I don't know how he survives."

Another researcher, Kevin Lee, recalled that for a period in the 1970s, the only things he ever saw Lynch eat came out of a vending machine, a single vending machine. His main meal consisted of salted peanuts mixed into soft drinks.

"You know, Gar," Lee recalled telling him, "you might think about diversifying your diet. Nothing radical, but hey, man, try a new machine. Have some chips."

Lynch's diet was of a piece with his extreme work habits, which typically included seven days a week of 12-hour or longer shifts in the lab, often followed by monumental bouts in the nearest bar.

Given 400 square feet of lab space and $900 to equip it, Lynch quickly made discoveries having to do with the brain's ability to repair some damage to itself after injury. It had generally been thought that the brain was static, that it did not produce new cells or structures after it reached maturity. Lynch and others began to wonder whether the brain did not possess more malleability, what was called plasticity.

In 1973, just as Lynch was expanding his investigation of brain plasticity, a pair of scientists in Europe discovered that when they stimulated the hippocampus with electric current intended to simulate brain activity, connections between hippocampal cells were strengthened and, more important, those strengthened connections could be retained indefinitely. They called the phenomenon long-term potentiation (LTP).

The combination of brief stimulation and long-lasting effect matched the key characteristics scientists had long associated with memory. Lynch and others wondered whether LTP was the biochemical process underlying memory. A global race was on to prove it. Thirty-two years later, Lynch hoped he was near the end of it.

'A strange place'

Lynch lab has been staffed over the years by a succession of visiting scientists, grad students, postdoctoral researchers, dope peddlers, English majors and whoever else was swept up in Lynch's often irresistible aura.

All of the inhabitants have been very bright, some brilliant. A number have gone on to chair university departments, to found successful companies or to publish distinguished papers, but when they were in the Lynch Lab, there wasn't much to recommend them to civil society. Any hint of future distinction was obscured by the chain-gang grind of life in the lab.

Lynch's extraordinary drive and ability to make every person feel that he or she was working on the single most important experiment in neuroscience history was the oxygen the lab lived on. Especially in the early years -- a period Lynch called "the boy lab" because of its testosterone-driven internal competitions -- the lab was a woolly place, not far removed in its culture from a Neanderthal cave. The guy with the biggest club generally got his way. Lynch, while not at all physically imposing, had a ferocious temper and never left a shadow of a doubt about his willingness to swing whatever was at hand. The history of the place was littered with battered telephones and drywall with holes suspiciously the size of baseball bats and fists.

"That's part and parcel of the fire that burns in him," said Lee, who now chairs the neuroscience department at the University of Virginia. "The phone on the wall? It just looked like a baseball sometimes."

"He never really hurt anybody physically but himself. Although there were people with emotional scars, I can tell you," said John Larson, now of the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Lynch said: "That lab was a strange, strange place. A lot of weird, weird, different kinds of people. The dean would look at it and say, 'That's a strange damn place.' I'd answer: 'Have you looked at me?' "

Amy Arai, a native of Japan, recalled the culture shock she felt when she joined the lab in the 1980s. "In Japan, everything is very formal. Scientists wear jackets and ties to work every day. Here in Irvine, nobody did that," she said. "I had a hard time even locating Gary. . . . I wandered around looking for him. There were lots of people wandering around, including one particularly scruffy guy I saw in the hallways, shirt always untucked and dirty. I'd sort of hold my breath when I passed him in the hall. I thought he was a janitor."

One day, weeks after arriving, Arai was summoned to Lynch's office, which was removed from the rest of the faculty offices in a double-wide trailer next to a parking lot. Arai walked in and found the trailer empty except for the "janitor," who was sitting behind a desk smoking a cigar. It was Lynch.

Baudry, a Frenchman, toured labs in the United States for five weeks in 1978, then went back to Paris and told his professors he was going to join Lynch. Baudry recalled the reaction of Jean-Pierre Changeux, the rising star of French neuroscience: "He looked at me. He said, 'You're crazy. Gary Lynch? The hippie of neurobiology?' I said, 'I'll take my chance.' I went to Gary's lab, and it really was something different in its ambience. All these wild people. The contrast with Paris -- fields, cows around the campus. I thought, I have to give this a shot. It really was the Wild West. And Gary really was this wild person."

Lynch still draws an off-kilter collection of researchers. His latest lab -- the "girl lab," as he described it -- included a grad student who wasn't officially assigned to the lab, a postdoc who ended up there by virtue of being kicked out of her original department, and a preternaturally talented undergrad who was hanging out only long enough to decide which med-school scholarship to accept. The senior scientists, except for one man who never left his private office, were three women, who seemed to speak with one another as seldom as possible.

Work was assigned largely by Lynch's judgment of who could do what. If an undergrad was able, he would find himself in the middle of crucial experiments.

The lab has changed locations and varied in size over time -- anywhere from three dozen people to as few as six or seven. In January 2005, there were around a dozen regular members, with students floating in and out.

Much of the work was some variation of two basic LTP experiments. One involved isolating single neurons, which, using high-powered microscopes, were identified, then pinched with a clamp to hold them in place. This was exceptionally tedious. Researchers could go entire days without successfully clamping a single cell.

The other experiment entailed placing a thin slice of a rat's hippocampus in a nutrient bath in which it stayed alive for hours, then imposing one of a variety of conditions on the slice -- usually, infusing it with chemicals known to inhibit or incite certain molecular reactions -- then stimulating the slice with a precisely timed, placed and quantified electric impulse and measuring what happened to that impulse.

What the scientists were trying to find out by blocking or inviting the action of certain molecules was what role they played in LTP. Theoretically, you could determine all of the principal agents by this process of elimination.

In practice, people spent extraordinary amounts of time -- hours at a sitting, days or weeks in succession -- staring at graphical renderings of the results on computer screens. It was not work filled with obvious drama or even, except for making the occasional note in a lab journal, movement. The lab was quiet -- no music; no telephones; low conversations, when there were any at all.

Lynch lived in dread of being scooped on discoveries. The residents of the lab did not gush in praise of his patience. He strode among the benches several times a day to see how much progress was -- or, more usually, was not -- being made.

Lynch talked often about hating the day-to-day process of science, the actual experiments. He could hardly bear to wait for them to be done to prove what he suspected to be true.

One day, explaining his distaste, Lynch said, "There is so damned much housekeeping. The problem is, biology is a very horizontal science. You have this result over here, that one over there. None of it lines up."

His lack of enthusiasm for working on the bench meant that he needed others who were both capable and willing to do it. No wonder he was unhappy about the rash of holiday vacations.

'Shadow land'

See Memory link on the sidebar for Parts 2-4.

 PERFECT SOLDIERS

“The definitive book on the nineteen men who brought such devastation and terror to this country. . . . A well-told, meticulously researched cautionary tale.” —Washington Post Book World 

PRAISE FOR

Perfect Soldiers

“With a reporter’s exacting discipline and a novelist’s sense of story, Terry McDermott illuminates the lives of the men who attacked us on 9/11. It is a tour de force that demands to be read.”  —Peter Bergen, CNN terrorism analyst and author of Holy  War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama Bin Laden 

“The very best [book] available . . . on the subject.” —Los Angeles Times 

“Absorbing. . . . [A] richly textured narrative full of the sort of small, telling details that turn these men from faceless figures of evil into individuals.” —New York Times

“Fascinating. Perfect Soldiers is a simultaneously passionate, compassionate, and dispassionate book that neither indicts Islam nor excuses the terrorists’ crimes but draws a chilling, clear, and cautionary map of the small, fateful steps with which ordinary men cross the dangerous line between faith and fanaticism.” —Francine Prose, O, The Oprah Magazine 

“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. It’s all in the details, and they are all here. This is journalism at its best.” —Seymour M. Hersh, The New Yorker 

"It is not for nothing that McDermott refers to the members of the Hamburg cell as 'perfect soldiers.' None of what he says, of course, should be in any way construed as an apology or a justification of what the plotters did on September 11. But it is important to distinguish between moral outrage and pragmatic comprehension. In order to defeat the terrorists, we have no choice but to understand them first—no matter what George Bush's minions might claim to the contrary." --New York Review of Books

“Comprehensively and compellingly traces the lives of the four terrorists who piloted the doomed jetliners . . . with . . . skilled reporting and unbiased writing.” —Rocky Mountain News (Denver) 

“A powerful narrative that presents the most convincing picture of the 9/11 hijackers to date.” —New Statesman 

“The definitive account of who the plotters were and how they germinated and nurtured [their] plan. . . . Remarkably insightful for readers hungry to know more about the Sept. 11 attacks, fundamentalist Islam in general, and Al Qaeda in particular. In a literary segment crowded with books, this one stands out.” —The Oregonian 

“Engrossing. [Terry] McDermott’s doggedness and eye for detail enable him to get as close as one ever will to answering why a group of fairly ordinary men from intact families and unexceptional backgrounds became the extremists who executed such a monstrous act. Paints a vivid portrait of the pilots who led the devastating attacks.” —Cleveland Plain Dealer 

“Thoroughly researched. . . . A disturbing investigation. . . . As interesting and important as the story of the hijackers in Perfect Soldiers is the author’s ability to explain in simple terms the complicated blend of politics, religion, and customs of that area of the world that spawned these radical young men.” —Denver Post 

“The book provides a fascinating account of how this sense of rootless alienation led to the radicalization of Atta and the other members of the al-Quds mosque.” —The London Evening Standard 

“The success McDermott achieved in overcoming barriers is remarkable. . . . Bound to become one of the most insightful books ever published about what is now called simply 9/11.” —New Orleans Times-Picayune 

“McDermott puts a human face on the hijackers and offers riveting accounts of the final weeks and days as the plotters prepared to carry out their horrific mission.” —Booklist 

“Mr. McDermott tells the story like a novelist.” —Embassy magazine

“It’s taken three-plus years for a serious study of the hijackers, but the wait was worth it.”—Publishers Weekly 

“Bound to become one of the most insightful books ever published about September 11.”—Houston Chronicle 

“Deeply reported. . . . Top Ten Book of the Year.” —Washington Monthly 

“Painstakingly researched.” —Financial Times 

“A chilling read.” —Kirkus Reviews

Facts, and 9/11

by

Terry McDermott

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was driving my middle daughter to her Southern California high school car pool when I heard on the radio that a jetliner had flown into the north tower of the World Trade Center. I'm a reporter at the Los Angeles Times and although I surely didn't know its full portent that morning, I knew we were at the edge of something new and frightening. I dropped off my daughter, returned home, and packed a bag. Within a week I was assigned to write a profile of Mohamed Atta, then thought to be one of the masterminds of the attacks. My editor's instructions were to go wherever I needed to go and stay as long as I needed to stay. Neither of us imagined the reporting would take three years and require travel to twenty countries on four continents.

Perfect Soldiers is the report of what I found. It's important to note what it was I was after. A simple search on Powells.com finds around 500 books about some aspect of September 11. The overwhelming majority of them are, in a fundamental sense, polemics — arguments about who to blame for what had happened. We live in an argument-obsessed age. Opinions are shouted from mountain top, valley, and every destination in between. I wanted, instead of shouting what I believed, to find what was findable, to lay down a baseline of factual information before it disappeared forever, which it might well have.

Opinions are easy, broad, and often trivial. Facts are hard, granular, and sometimes revelatory. Would it inform us more to be told that one author thinks, without much basis, that 9/11 was the fault of a conspiracy involving the Saudi royal family and Texas oilmen or to learn that the first thing Mohamed el-Amir Atta usually did when he came home to his student apartment in Hamburg was to exchange his street shoes for a pair of blue flip-flops? I don't know about you, but complicated conspiracy theories that tie far-fetched ideas together in an unending string that circles the globe don't help me much.

I don't think the world works that way. I look for more organic, natural processes. As a friend put it to me once, if you hear hoof beats in the distance, they're probably coming from horses, not zebras. The flip-flops could be a powerful instrument to help explain the men who attacked us. They're horses. Conspiracy theories are zebras.

Here are a few more hoof beats: September 11 pilot Marwan al-Shehhi habitually carried a bag of candy with him wherever he went and shared it with whomever he met. Hijack pilot Ziad Jarrah frequently signed his e-mails with long strings of exclamation points; he was the favorite uncle of his nieces and nephews, the one who would take them to the beach or out for ice cream. When the hijack pilots moved to the United States to train, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a would-be pilot who could never get a U.S. visa, stayed behind in Germany and had an affair with a ballet dancer in Berlin.

These mundane facts of daily existence are the raw materials of lives that, if accumulated in sufficient quantity, can begin to give some insight on the forces behind large events. They help to inform us once again of a fundamental aspect of men who commit horrific acts of inhumanity. It is in a way the oldest story — that of the banality of evil, the nearly organic way in which these men came to be who they became.

I, like almost every writer, have literary ambitions. My intentions in this book, however, were almost anti-literary. The events of September 11 didn't need to be remade and rethought in heightened dramatic fashion. They needed to be understood. The way I conceived of doing this was no great revelation. It was the only way I knew to be available to me: to go where the 9/11 hijackers had lived and learned and even loved and tell the stories of their lives, to attempt to fit those mundane details into the larger courses of history through which they floated. If there was to be any literary ambition in this, it would be to construct a poetry of fact.

This very modest goal proved to be immensely difficult.

Recently, there were three books on the national bestsellers lists about Scott Peterson, a man who murdered his pregnant wife. That was doubtless an horrendous act, but do we really need three books about him. Meanwhile, there were — other than this one — no books devoted primarily to the 9/11 hijackers.

The reason, pretty simply, is that information about them is scarce and very hard to find. This was without question the most difficult reporting I've ever endured. And endurance is what was required. During many weeks in the reporting, I went backwards — that is, I lost rather than gained information. But I am above all else stubborn and I committed to the long haul. If it was there, I was going to get it, or exhaust all means in the attempt. Whatever success this book represents is the result of that stubbornness.

One of the consistent oddities of being a reporter has to do with the most fundamental aspect of it — you ask people questions and they answer you. Why? It always astonishes me that no matter what the event or circumstance, you can find people with relevant knowledge who will talk. In the instance of most disasters or other horrific events, people often talk to reporters out of a sense of remorse or some slight responsibility. It's that "if only" feeling: If only I had done this, or: If only I had seen that. Because they feel this way, they are often persuaded to talk. In fact, they are often eager to talk, have been waiting to be asked. That had been my experience prior to this project. I interviewed more than 500 people for this book. Not five of them were eager to talk. In large part, this was because they didn't believe the men had anything to do with it, or, if they believed it, felt no remorse about it.

One of the consequences of the paucity of information was the proliferation of rumor and gossip and their solidification into fact. If you go back and review what else has been written about the nineteen hijackers, you'll find a huge quantity of words based on a miniscule amount of information. You'll also find conclusions based on the thinnest of threads.

Not unusually for a large news event, a public narrative of the 9/11 attacks and attackers was constructed with astonishing speed: by the end of the first week after the attacks, the central story had been set and the characters cast. Unfortunately, as is also usual in big news events, much of the initial information was either factually wrong or, more commonly, irrelevant and misconstrued. The hijackers were caricatured as evil geniuses or as wild-eyed fanatics. While there might well be trace elements of both of these extremes in some of the men, they were largely neither of these things.

I think portraying them as motivated by this one thing or the other is understandable, but misleading. The forces that drove the men in the 9/11 plot are many and complicated; they include broad historical trends, specific political objections, devout if wholly misguided religious belief, psychological alienation, and self aggrandizement.

For a long time in my reporting, I struggled to find who had recruited these men to this cause. In the end, I was forced to admit they weren't recruited. They were volunteers. They delivered themselves.

What can we do to stop them?

This question, without close competition, is the one I'm most often asked about the post 9/11 world. It's the central question going forward, one we're going struggle to answer for decades.

When it is posed in public forums, there is invariably at least one person in the room who knows exactly what to do: Kill them. Kill them all. Hunt them down, dig them out, and rid the world of their wretched existence. This solution has a lot to recommend it. It's decisive, no dilly-dallying around there. It's pure hearted, good versus evil. It's satisfying in a cinematic, righteous-justice-delivered-at-the-
business-end-of-a-cruise-missile-with-great-fiery-effect sort of way. And it's elegant in its logic. Obviously, if they are all dead, they can't harm anyone ever again.

Unfortunately, even if this were your desired policy, it seems upon even casual inspection impossible to execute. It's surpassingly difficult to even begin to find them all, much less finish the job. It's revenge fantasy, not reason.

Start at the most basic level: Who are they? Where are they? How will we know them much less find them? Where do we start? Where do we end? When does one become a they? Is there a line between sympathizer and soldier? Wouldn't we be likely to kill a bunch of people who only looked, or perhaps talked, or thought, like bad guys?

I have been distressed to discover the degree to which casually malevolent ideas are ambient in much of the contemporary Arab world, at how much the view from there has been shaped by mythic beliefs. I say mythic in the same sense that Karen Armstrong uses it to describe the nature of belief among fundamentalists in all religions, that the nature of their beliefs are pre-rational and unshakable by the existence of contrary fact. I must have been told a hundred times during my research that 9/11 could not have happened without the connivance, indeed, the active execution, of either or both the American CIA and Israeli Mossad. Those who espouse these theories hold a view that the United States is omnipotent and, therefore, nothing of this scale could happen unbeknownst to us. All evidence to the contrary — which is depressing in its own way — matters not a bit. I was repeatedly told no Jews died in the World Trade Center. One of my own interpreters, an upper middle class Cairene whose career goal was to come to the United States and open a chain of LASIK eye surgery clinics, in other words, a Westernized Arab, a scientist, would ask me every two or three days why the Jews stayed home that day.

That is the situation at the heart of contemporary, moderate Islam. It goes downhill, quickly, from there to the fringes where there exists a cult, a large cult with millions of members, who choose to find within their religion's historical texts a rationale to attack, and kill, any who oppose them. They think they are at war. No, they are at war. The men within radical Islam see themselves as soldiers in that war. They see what they were doing as having the obligations of soldiers, serving the righteous cause of an army with the winds of redemption at its back.

The cult, not accidentally, is centered in Saudi Arabia and in the explicitly political and allegedly literal interpretation of Salafist Wahabism embraced there. Whatever else is done to combat terrorism, this interpretation of Islam has to be confronted.

That at least is a place to start. You can't have spent as much time as I have studying these people without wondering what to do and, yet, I haven't found a solution that satisfies. Perhaps that's because there is no single answer. Just as there are many causes that brought these men together, so are there many reasons that drive them apart from us.

Like, I imagine, most people, I had in the beginning assumed the hijackers — and those who would follow them — were in some ways extraordinary individuals, that they otherwise couldn't have accomplished something so huge. The biggest surprise to me was they were nearly the opposite — all too common among young men in similar circumstances across the Muslim world. The obvious implication of them being ordinary is that there must be many more men just like them. I think there are. I think they're waiting. I think this is the world we will live in for a long time to come.