Brain
Researchers Open Door To Editing Unwanted Memories.
N.Y.
Times, Apr 6th, 2009
By Benedict Carey
Suppose scientists could erase certain
memories by tinkering with a single substance in the brain. Could make
you forget a chronic fear, a traumatic loss, even a bad habit.
Researchers in Brooklyn have recently
accomplished comparable feats, with a single dose of an experimental drug
delivered to areas of the brain critical for holding specific types of
memory, like emotional associations, spatial knowledge or motor skills.
The drug blocks the activity of a
substance that the brain apparently needs to retain much of its learned
information. And if enhanced, the substance could help ward of dimensias
and other memory problems.
So far, the research has been done
on animals. But scientists say this memory system is likely to work almost
identically in people.
The discovery of such an apparently
critical memory molecule, and its many potential uses, are part of the
buzz surrounding the field that, in just a few years, has made the seemingly
impossible suddenly probable: neuroscience, the study of the brain.
"If this molecule is as important
as it appears to be, you can see the possible implications," said
Dr. Todd C. Sacktor, a 52-year-old neuroscientist who leads the team at
the SUNY Downstate Medical Center, in Brooklyn, which demonstrated its
effect on memory. "For trauma. For addiction, which is a learned
behavior. Ultimately for improving memory and learning."
Artists and writers have led the exploration
of identity, consciousness and memory for centuries. Yet even as scientists
sent men to the moon and scacecraft to Saturn and submarines to the ocean
floor, the instrument responsible for such feats, the human mind, remained
almost entirely dark, a vast and mostly uncharted universe as mysterious
as the New World was to explorers of the past....
....Dr. Fenton had already devised
a clever way to teach animals strong memories for where things are located.
He teaches them to move around a small chamber to avoid a mild electric
shock [1] to their feet. Once the animals
learn, they do not forget. Place back in the chamber a day later, even
a month later, they quickly remember how to avoid the shock and do so....
"This possibility of memory editing
has enormous possibilities [2] and raises
huge ethical issues," said Dr. Steven E. Hyman, a neurobiologist
at Harvard. "On the one hand, you can imagine a scenario in which
a person enters a setting which elicits traumatic memories, but now has
a drug that weakens those memories as they come up. Or, in the case of
addiction, the drug that weakens the associations that stir craving."
....Yet as scientists begin to climb
out of the dark foothills and into dim light, they are nowe poised to
alter the understanding of human nature in ways that artists and writers
have not [3].
