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| Volume 48, Number 3, Fall 1999 |
by Deborah Blum
I had forgotten Eddie Finney. He belonged to a few grim and exhausting weeks from long ago. There he had stayed and I had not missed him. Until, almost 20 years later, I began working on a series on the biology of behavior. Then, right in the midst of interviewing scientists about violence, he came back, from some dark corner of my mind. I could see him again with that half-smile on his face, sitting in the courtroom, his feet up casually on the wooden defense table. He would wink at me every morning, clearly amused by little Miss Prim and Proper, the brand-new reporter cautiously inspecting the murderer.
Eddie Finney was not the first killer whose trial I had covered, but he was-and remains to this day-the most terrifying I have encountered, the only person I have ever met who seemed ice-cold indifferent all the way through. It was that quality of icy self-absorption that suddenly became real again, as I listened to scientists trying to explain the brains of murderers. The discussions were mostly clinical: days of discussing enzymes and neurotransmitters, hormones and brain structure. Yet, Eddie Finney was there too, to remind me that chemistry is not enough, that there are limits to the ability of science to define humans, for better and for worse.
He was 20 years old at the time of trial, the son of a maintenance worker in the small Georgia town where I worked. His parents came to court, dressed like churchgoers, every day. They sat numbly, talking to no one, just listening. Here is what we all heard: Finney and a friend, Johnny Westbrook, had visited an upper-class neighborhood looking for yard work. They were hired to come back the next day by a widow, whose yard stretched across a green and shady half acre. She was 70 and I have wondered sometimes what she said, what she gave away in that first too-trusting conversation. Did she say something such as "I'm a widow, I live alone, I can't handle the yard work myself"? Because when they came back the next day, they came prepared. They brought a gun.
They forced her into the house,
robbed her, tied her to her bed, and took turns raping her and
having snacks in the kitchen. She finally got out the door and
ran screaming for help to her next-door neighbor and best friend,
a woman of about the same age. It was evening by then; her friend
was just starting dinner. The beginnings of a meatloaf were out
on the counter when her husband later came home. By all accounts,
the would-be rescuer ran out of the kitchen still wearing her
little checked apron. They slammed the gun into her head, ripped
up her apron, and used it to bind both women's hands. Then, they
took the widow's car and drove out into the country, into a neighboring
county, down a dirt road, into the shadows of a forest popular
with deer hunters.
They had the gun, of course, and it was loaded. Yet, it turned out in the trial, Eddie Finney thought that was too quick a way to kill, too boring. The women were beaten with boards taken from a deer stand used for hunting, and then, just to make sure, he jumped up and down on their chests. I will tell you only that the resulting autopsy evidence at the trial was so grisly that jurors were physically sick.
The bodies were left in the forest. The car was abandoned by some railroad tracks. Both men had records. There were fingerprints in the car and spatters of blood and the killers were stupid and flashy with newly stolen cash and jewelry. They were arrested within days on suspicion of murder. Suspicion only because no one knew where the bodies were or if the women were alive.
It came out at the trial that the police had asked Finney to help them find the women. For a running joke, he had directed them all over central Georgia. They begged him, for the families' sake, to tell the truth. Finally, bored with the game, he led them to the bodies. It appeared that he considered the trial entertaining as well. He sat back every day, feet up, smiling at the crowd. The only people he ignored completely were his parents, as if they would have been a bad audience.
I have come to suspect that his lawyers must have hated him, to let him behave like that in the courtroom, instead of insisting that he present the image of a nice, quiet boy. It was the only criminal trial I have covered in which a primary suspect seemed so happy to be there, as if it were all a show and he were the star. In a way, he was right; the drama centered on him or at least what he had done. In closing arguments, the district attorney brought a heavy board, a deer-stand board. First, he spoke of how many bones had been broken in the killings; then, he smashed the board against the floor. "Ask yourself this," he said to the jury. "If this isn't a death penalty crime, what is?"
It was a long time before I could hear a cracking sound-a car backfire or a thunderstorm-without thinking of murder. I was glad to leave it behind. It was three jobs, a move across country, graduate school, and a career shift to science writing before I really thought about Eddie Finney again. I had been working at the Sacramento Bee, as a science writer, for more than 10 years when I decided to do a series on behavioral biology. One of the blessings of working at a fairly large regional paper is that there is time and money to do in-depth work. Also, the Sacramento Bee's editors really believe in reporting on complex issues. I had worked on a host of challenging projects since I had been there. Let's face it, behavioral biology was a perfect fit with the notions of complex and challenging.
What I wanted to tackle, actually, was the so-called nature versus nurture debate. I like to do stories that emphasize the connection between research (which people tend to place on some abstract plane) and real life. I had noticed what I thought was an interesting pattern at several meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. At one meeting, there had been a host of presentations on the biology of behavior. In the next, in 1995, there were just as many presentations warning of the ethical risks and dilemmas for scientists involved in that field. Both aspects interested me: the apparent heating up of the research and the corresponding coolness of the response. And the science continues to heat up: the 1996, 1997, and 1998 meetings were packed with straight-ahead behavioral biology.
I was intrigued by this wavering between enthusiasm for the science and moral queasiness. This kind of beginning-simple curiosity-can sometimes feel almost too open-ended as a beginning to a project. Some reporters prefer to establish their line of sight early, deciding up front, for instance, to write a series on corruption in science. I prefer to explore, to leave open the possibility of changing my mind. To step back briefly, I once did a series on space-based weapons that began with the premise that California scientists were helping design tomorrow's wars. The final product, though, was about the fact that they were designing very expensive weapons that did not work. I reached that conclusion about three months into the investigation, forcing me to refocus my articles.
Obviously, there are risks to open-endedness. If you sell a
proposal on pure interest and no evidence, then you have no idea
if the rabbit is actually in the hat. You may pull out the world's
most boring series. In the weapons series, I was starting to wonder
if I would have a story at all. It gives a nice, panic-driven
edge to the reporting, of course, but I would not recommend it
as policy. Most in-depth projects demand some serious advance
exploration.
Among other things, feeling your way through a project demands
a great deal of time. It took eight months, to produce the biology
of behavior series, "Only Human," which ran for four
days in late 1995. Saying that you want to write about human behavior
is almost like saying that you want to write a series about the
universe. The options stretch into infinity. I spent almost two
months doing preliminary interviews and reading through journals
before I decided on a focus or point of view.
Having mentioned some of the drawbacks, in this case-in a research
realm that made even researchers uneasy-I think slow exploration
was the right approach. I investigated and eventually discarded
some very borderline science because I had gained enough depth
of understanding to do that. I was also able to consider how best
to approach an evolving science, to give readers a sense of the
continuum, how the field had changed, and how it might continue
to do so. All of that-curiosity, open-mindedness, a sense of science
in motion, allowance for error-becomes essential when covering
an uncertain science.
Scientists by no means understand the biology of living behavior,
of humans, or of any other animal. They have pieces of the puzzle,
but they are not even sure how to order those shapes. In this
sense, behavioral biologists are only part of the research crowd.
Incomplete understanding, evolving knowledge is the rule for many
disciplines. I was reminded of this recently when doing a series
of climate stories, just as a series of storms poured untold and
unwanted water all over northern California, causing disastrous
floods. As I queried meteorologists on the how's and why's of
bad weather formation, Kelly Redmond, a forecaster with the National
Weather Service's Climate Prediction Center in Reno, Nevada, finally
said to me: "Here's what it's like. You're standing in front
of a giant painting. And you can see a rooftop here, a tree branch
there, maybe even a few streets. Some of it is in beautiful detail.
But mostly the painting is blank, unfinished. And yet, from those
few finished parts, we're trying to see the picture." Science
writers, too, need to get a sense of that unfinished painting,
and I hope that we are learning how important it is to convey
that sense of work-in-progress. Our readers, listeners, and viewers
should know that uncertainty is a normal part of the process of
science.
It is also true that this very open-ended nature makes it easy for people with strong biases (and this includes researchers) to use those pieces of scenery to create a picture they want to see. They may imply the simplicity we seem to want and when the subject is human behavior, simplicity can be dangerous. People may suggest that certain individuals, or groups, are born bad, stupid, or unnecessarily.
So, the uncertainty factor in behavioral biology, as in most science, is not unusual. What separates it from some other sciences are the many ethical dilemmas attached to it. It is not just that there is a potential to do harm; the science has already been used to do so. In the first half of this century, a cadre of scientists argued for the concept of bad seeds and inheritable criminal tendencies. Understanding of behavioral genetics was even sketchier then. Yet, the scientists persuaded lawmakers that they had the full picture. Some 60,000 Americans (all poor, all powerless) were involuntarily sterilized under laws duly created. The American laws later became the model for the Nazi eugenics program. The shadow of that vicious period of eugenics remains with us today, and there are those who still argue that the issues are too dangerous to be discussed. Some newspaper readers made this point: maybe the science is good research, but it is hurtful by suggestion. Let's leave it alone.
I do not believe in that. I do not believe that we rid ourselves of risks by pretending they are not there. Instead, at least in this case, I believe that if newspapers can help readers better understand the science involved, those readers will be less easily duped by those who seek to misuse the research. I am not arguing that every person needs to be educated to the point that he or she can conduct gene-mapping surveys. We do not all need to be scientists; we all need a basic understanding of the process.
Science evolves, it changes, and it may make mistakes. Researchers, we hope, take care to correct their errors. This is normal process; this is not aberration. What field of human endeavor is error-free? Good science writing, if nothing else, gets that concept across. I would like to believe that readers of my stories would laugh if someone tried to persuade them that we know that one gene can make an entire group of people stupid.
Finally, although the human drama of behavioral biology makes it different from, say, condensed-matter physics, that tension is something of a gift to journalists. It allows us to raise the potentially boring issues of scientific process, uncertainty, method, and credibility in a compelling way. In a subtle way, it is (yes, I admit it) education, but the very drama also adds another kind of responsibility. These stories of crime or genetic threats or scientific mistakes are not merely opportunities to show off, to flash a few exciting phrases. They are real. I may talk now about the remembered horrors of the Finney-Westbrook trial, but I was still a buffered distance from the tragedy. The families of the murdered women could not bear to even sit in the courtroom with the defendants; they could not look at them. When I left to write my last story-the decision to invoke the death penalty-Eddie Finney's parents were still sitting, isolated on a wooden bench. They were weeping. When we write about how people behave-what they do to each other-we should never forgot whom the story is about or why it needs to be told.
It is my firmly held opinion that a lengthy series on a controversial topic needs to be precisely focused. Otherwise, it becomes a rambling mess of scientists arguing and contradicting each other. People call this the "he-said, she-said phenomenon," or sometimes the "talking heads dilemma." No one is going to read four days of stories that end up as one enormous "Huh?" There needs to be a flow and a direction to a series, a point of view. I organize my stories around a viewpoint; it helps me select the topics I am going to cover and how I am going to present them. Let me emphasize that this differs from parading a political bias. For example, in 1991, I wrote a series on primate research called "The Monkey Wars," which explored the ethical dilemmas of primate research. The viewpoint was this: animal research is not just the story of a bunch of furry animals. It is about us. The research puts a light on our species-the decisions we make, as the planet's most powerful species, to use other species. Thus, every story in that series was built around a person making choices-a researcher, a surgeon, an activist.
The focus of "Only Human" was more subtle, and it was harder to find. Yet, I perceive it as so important that I have returned to it again and again as a reporter. It has kept me interested in behavioral biology long after the series ended. Doing the series changed the way I thought about the science of behavior. I began by being curious about the way biology influences behavior-and I learned that behavior influences biology. Perhaps certain hormone levels heighten a competitive attitude; perhaps seeking out competition raises those hormone levels. Perhaps a nurturing environment encourages a more stable brain chemistry and perhaps a hostile environment does the opposite.
Reporting this story taught me that biology dances with behavior. We tend to think of the debate as nature versus nurture, when there is no either-or. Who we are and how we behave is a matter of nature and nurture, and those two forces shape each other constantly. Biology influences behavior; behavior influences biology. Perhaps some genes are more influential, perhaps some environments exert more force, perhaps the fundamentals are established early, but the potential for change and response is lifelong. I think this is a message with a lot of hope, but practically, it is that constant feedback that makes analyzing a behavior so very tricky. This give-and-take between what we inherit and what the world provides us is somehow very difficult to hammer into the public consciousness.
Although the series explored those questions by looking at various behaviors, at intelligence, and at sex differences, I am going to continue here with a focus on violence only. Let us ask what creates a killer. Is it some internal biology, is it environment and circumstance, or is it some combination of the two? Can you answer those questions in any realistic way? We can generalize, announce safely that some scientists suspect some criminals possess a biology that predisposes them to violence. That is easy and that is safe, but let's make it specific, personal. Are killers, like Eddie Finney, born that way, set on that path before their first breath? There are those who believe this is true.
Yet, can you imagine any credible scientist picking up a newborn and labeling that baby a future murderer? If you insist on nature versus nurture, then you are trapped between that and the alternative. Is the killer created out of bitterness and cruelty and whatever twists a person into something lethal? How do you determine that? Who is to blame? Even my belief-that it is both nature and nurture-does not eliminate those issues. Again, it is the explosive potential of such questions that makes covering the uncertainties in behavioral biology so different from those in other sciences.
Having said that, I know there are very good scientists who argue that some criminals-not killers, necessarily-are shaped primarily by biology. One of the foremost of these is Robert Hare, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia. Hare has devoted his career to studying psychopaths (sometimes called sociopaths). He describes them as so chilly in their reactions that they sometimes seem not quite human. They are separated from the rest of us by a matter of temperature. Quoting him here, "I think sometimes of a continuum from water to ice. Liquid water and ice have the same components but they are very different, aren't they? And these guys are the ice."
Hare is the developer of the renowned Psychopathy Check List (PCL), used to diagnose psychopaths and also used as a measure of other troubling tendencies, such as antisocial behavior. The PCL is solidly mainstream. Many prisons use it as a predictor of which inmates will return (high scorers routinely come back). Most people, in fact, most criminals, do not get very high scores on the checklist. Yet, those who do, Hare argued, are born psychopaths. It matters not how kind the home, how friendly the environment, he said; a psychopath is born so disconnected from those around him, he can never be brought truly into the family circle. Hare claimed to have used the PCL to identify psychopathic tendencies, and emotional coldness, in children as young as six years old.
Psychopaths are not necessarily murderers. What they are, Hare said, is totally self-absorbed, each a sun in the solar system around him. They are solely directed toward getting exactly what they want, resentful of anyone who gets in their way and they will do what is necessary to reach their goal. Thus, some become con men, thieves, rapists, or killers. Often, they are not arrested for the same crime twice. They tend to regard both people and laws that interfere with their goals as irritants and obstacles. They do, however, learn to fake reactions, according to Hare. They become expert at pretending concern or compassion and, he added, they become expert at fooling prison psychologists.
In one startling series of tests, Hare and his colleagues compared the brains of diagnosed psychopaths with a control group. All had a criminal record; the control group tended to be mainly people with a history of minor drug abuse. The scientists were strictly interested in emotional response. They sat each participant in front of a computer screen that flashed a series of words: some nonsense (xyzubl), some neutral (table), and some loaded (death). They got the same reaction from every member of the control group: When a word like death appeared on the screen, the regions of the brain associated with emotional processing flashed to brilliant life. Interviews showed that people in the control group tended to associate the word with someone they cared about and had lost, but that did not happen with the psychopaths. There was no emotional connection. The parts of the brain associated with affection and grief stayed dark. Their brains processed death as something neutral.
Hare said that when he first showed the images to neuroscientists they suggested the equipment was not working properly. "And then they asked me, are these really human brains?" he said. He came to believe that emotional response is essential to a rational human response and that these brains are truly dysfunctional. He suspected that the chemistry or structure that isolates the emotional regions of the brain, that blocks caring for others, forms at a very young age, perhaps even in infancy. From this point, he argued, environment is irrelevant. No loving home or giving family can alter it, neither can punishment. He argued that diagnosed high-end psychopaths should be isolated from all other prisoners and held for life. He spoke of working with one psychopath in a Canadian prison who asked for help in getting a different prison job. Hare was unable to help. Later, Hare had some work done on his car in the prison auto shop where the man still worked. On the way home, the brakes failed. The brake line had been cut.
Could he prove his suspicion that the inmate was responsible? No. "But people ask me if psychopaths feel anything when they kill," he said, "and the answer is no. To them, it's like a chess game. The only point is are they winning?"
At this point, Eddie Finney suddenly clicked back into my mind. I could not return to Georgia past, bearing a Robert Hare with me, and have Finney officially diagnosed. Yet, he fit Hare's descriptions so well; I wondered what Finney's brain would have looked like in response to the word death, and because the trial was suddenly so real again, I found myself wondering about his parents, who seemed so nice and so sad, and about their son, who seemed to have treated murder as a form of personal entertainment.
Could I argue myself into believing that he was always that way, untouchable by kindness? In the realm of psychopathy, there are scientists who counter Hare's argument. They agree that once created, a psychopath is fixed, ego-centered to a degree that most of us cannot conceive and that those emotion-dead brains are real. Yet, they do not agree on what created them. There are scientists who will still argue that nurture/environment/conscious choice is all that exists. We can be taught self-absorption by example; a child can be isolated enough by the cruelty of his parents or the hostile setting of his life that his brain develops an emotional numbness in defense.
It turns out that a cold response to others is an unusually interesting example.
For instance, Bruce Perry, a neuroscientist at the Baylor University School of Medicine in Houston, has studied children who grow up in high-crime, inner-city neighborhoods. He spent the early 1990s, for instance, focusing on Chicago public housing, infamous for such cases as a five-year-old boy killed by two 10-year-olds because he refused to steal candy for them.
Perry's investigation focused on two major neurotransmitters in the brain, noradrenaline and serotonin. Noradrenaline is one of the body's prime alarm responses; it tenses muscles, speeds the heart, and prepares for quick reaction to danger. Serotonin is the opposite, inducing a calming response, a slower, more thoughtful reaction. We each inherit a certain baseline level of these neurotransmitters and they tend to balance. People with high noradrenaline run lower in serotonin, and they seem to end up in trouble more often.
Yet, Perry's work, with children of a threatening world, shows that constant threat can change that balance. Keep the pressure on, keep the state of alarm constant enough, and the body will eventually reset in self-defense. (The opposite is also true: children born jittery with high noradrenaline will calm down with loving treatment.) A small subset of these children go further. After too long a period in which noradrenaline keeps their hearts beating extra fast, their bodies heated with nerves, they literally cool down. In response to danger, their heart rate slows, and their skin cools. This group, he said, becomes predatory.
There is a curiously complementary study by a pair of psychologists at the University of Washington in Seattle, looking at wife beaters. These researchers, John Gottman and Larry Jacobsen, asked men convicted of spousal abuse to recreate arguments with their wives only verbally, while hooked up to monitoring equipment. Most of the men went hot with anger as the words flew, but again, a small group went cold. They turned out to be the most vicious and most violent. As they became angry, as they prepared to retaliate, their hearts also slowed. They became cooler, more deliberate, more calculating. "Like pythons, waiting to strike," Jacobsen said. He believed that reaction was probably created by their childhood, the kind of self-defensive beginnings that Perry charted.
If there is a consensus, it is that there is something in a person's original biology-perhaps in genes, perhaps from an early injury to the brain-that may predispose the person to react in a certain way. In other words, put a child with a certain vulnerable biology into a poisonous environment and he or she may indeed grow into a predator or, perhaps, a psychopath. There may also be, as Hare suspected, a select few who are so strongly predisposed that almost nothing will alter the developmental path. I mean that in both positive and negative ways. There are also children who build strong and decent lives out of the worst possible beginnings. Perry and many others commented on this as well, noting the resiliency and hopefulness of some children. Perry said that some of the children he studied hold onto a single act of kindness for years; it gives them hope.
It is into this complexity that the science seems to be going, trying to chart that ever-shifting balance between genes and environment, biology and behavior. Does that promise an end to uncertainty? Hardly. Did I realize that I would grapple with all those issues when I took up this particular series? Hardly. Nor did I realize how intensely readers would grapple with those same issues. In this area, as much as any I have ever covered, readers take the stories personally. They see themselves mirrored; they see people they know. They react not with interest, but with emotion. The series won national reporting awards. It also provoked the most intense response of any series I have written. I spent hours talking to local community groups, doing radio interviews, answering letters, and dealing with a small but furious picket line protesting the very existence of a biology of violence.
Many readers called me, some angry, some fascinated, and some who just wanted to talk about their lives. One caller was an attorney, a friend to a woman with a troubled son. The son was creepy, she said. They suspected that he had killed some animals. He seemed to hurt other children for fun. He had no sense of other people's rights or privacy. If he was visiting and he wanted to open drawers and cabinets and boxes, he did. He had rummaged through the lawyer's house. "He doesn't respond to what you say," she said. "He's not there." She read the story I had written about psychopaths and even as I thought of Finney, she and the mother thought of the 12-year-old boy. The mother had called the sheriff's department at one point, convinced her son was eventually going to do something terrible. We cannot do anything if he has not done something against the law, they told her. Wait and watch.
It is very difficult for journalism, a profession that adores the simple answer, to do watch-and-wait stories. It is frustrating. Yet, I think, that notion contains one of the realities of covering uncertainty in science. Science will change; our understanding will change, and what we write must provide that sense of motion. We have yet to report on the end of a story. Rather, as Kelly Redmond suggested, we are illuminating landmarks in a living landscape.
Behavioral geneticists continue to find genes related to behavior, but if you read the fine print, their influence is sometimes no more than 10 percent. It is easier to trumpet the discoveries-and those stories may get better play-but we serve neither science nor ourselves when the retractions, clarifications, and qualifications come later. In practical terms, journalists need to do their homework, to find a comfort zone in writing about a changing science. All of us could do better in getting across the notion of scientific process.
We also need to recognize that an uncertain science is not a wrong one. Behavioral biology seems solid in its overall concept: that is, genes influence behavior. But how much? A major uncertainty is how to translate that knowledge to an individual. The specific questions are hard to answer: what made Eddie Finney a murderer at age 20? Will the young boy I mentioned go the same way? Even if you knew that the potential was there, could you really predict those particularly heartless murders that I described earlier? Even if we could give a probability-say, 60 percent likelihood-of someone becoming an aggressive adult, what would we do about it?
As a hypothetical example, let's say scientists identified and could manipulate the genes that control noradrenaline levels. We know that noradrenaline can be associated with an aggressive response. Would we argue to modify all high-level types into more docile levels? What if noradrenaline is also related to an adventurous spirit, to exploring, to risk-taking in a healthy way? So, that much might depend on childhood, family, school. At what point would you declare a child a risk? Would you just watch and wait?
These are not just hypothetical questions, of course. They are political questions, even civil rights questions. They come up because, as we have discussed, there is a difference between studying the biology of behavior and studying the structure of clouds. People read between the lines on stories like these and, in that open space, they add all their own fears and concerns. There is room to appreciate uncertainty simply because it is also uncertain what we would do with the knowledge if we ever possessed it.
Deborah Blum until 1998 was a full-time science writer for The Sacramento Bee; she now teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is also the author of two books, The Monkey Wars and Sex on the Brain, and coeditor of A Field Guide to Science Writing. Reprinted from with permission from Communicating Uncertainty: Media Coverage of New and Controversial Science, edited by Sharon M. Friedman, Sharon Dunwoody, and Carol L. Rogers; published and copyrighted 1999 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.