Damn straight this has some ethical questions, as well as other questions. Technology is rarely, in and of itself, evil. More it is what mankind does with it that makes it evil or good. Life giving, enhancing, or used for evil purposes, such as taking away memories one should maintain. Our experience teaches us. Our experience is a collection of memories.
Still, as someone who has been extremely curious about the human brain for the last 35 years or so, this is very interesting.
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.
SUNY 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 off
So far, the research has been done only 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 a field that, in just the past few years, has made the seemingly impossible suddenly probable:
“If this molecule is as important as it appears to be, you can see the possible implications,” said
Artists and writers have led the exploration of identity, consciousness and memory for centuries. Yet even as scientists sent men to the moon and spacecraft 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.
Now
Endowments like the
The influx of money, talent and technology means that scientists are at last finding real answers about the brain — and raising questions, both scientific and ethical, more quickly than anyone can answer them.
Millions of people might be tempted to erase a severely painful memory, for instance — but what if, in the process, they lost other, personally important memories that were somehow related? Would a treatment that “cleared” the learned habits of addiction only tempt people to experiment more widely?
And perhaps even more important, when scientists find a drug to strengthen memory, will everyone feel compelled to use it?
The stakes, and the wide-open opportunities possible in brain science, will only accelerate the pace of discovery.
“In this field we are merely at the foothills of an enormous mountain range,” said
What could that engram actually be?
The answer, previous research suggests, is that brain cells activated by an experience keep one another on biological speed-dial, like a group of people joined in common witness of some striking event. Call on one and word quickly goes out to the
The
In the decades since this process was described in the 1960s and 1970s, scientists have found scores of molecules that play some role in the process. But for years the field struggled to pinpoint the purpose each one serves. The problem was not that such substances were so hard to find — on the contrary.
In a 1999 paper in the journal
They did not see that these findings were necessarily clarifying the picture of how memories are formed. But an oddball substance right there on their own list, it turned out, had unusual properties.
A Helpful Nudge
“You know, my dad was the one who told me to look at this molecule — he was
The father’s advice led the son, eventually, to a substance called PKMzeta. In a series of studies,
In fact, the PKMzeta molecules appeared to herd themselves, like Army Rangers occupying a small peninsula, into precisely the fingerlike connections among brain cells that were strengthened. And they stayed there, indefinitely, like biological sentries.
In short: PKMzeta, a wallflower in the great swimming party of chemicals that erupts when one cell stimulates another, looked as if it might be the one that kept the speed-dial function turned on.
“After that,”
Running a lab is something like fielding a weekend
“People think that state schools like ours are low-key, laid back, and they’re right, we are,” said
To find out what, if anything, PKMzeta meant for living, breathing animals,
But when injected — directly into their brain — with a drug called ZIP that interferes with PKMzeta, they are back to square one, almost immediately. “When we first saw this happen, I had grad students throwing their hands up in the air, yelling,”
They now have it.
A Conscience Blocker?
“This possibility of memory editing has enormous possibilities 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, a drug that weakens the associations that stir craving.”
Researchers have already tried to blunt painful memories and addictive urges using existing drugs; blocking PKMzeta could potentially be far more effective.
Yet any such drug,
For those studying the biology of memory, the properties of PKMzeta promise something grander still: the prospect of retooling the engram factory itself. By 2050 more than 100 million people worldwide will have Alzheimer’s disease or other
“This is really the biggest target, and we have some ideas of how you might try to do it, for instance to get cells to make more PKMzeta,”
A substance that improved memory would immediately raise larger social concerns, as well. “We know that people already use smart drugs and performance enhancers of all kinds, so a substance that actually improved memory could lead to an arms race,”
Many questions in the science remain. For instance, can PKMzeta really link a network of neurons for a lifetime? If so, how? Most molecules live for no more than weeks at a time.
And how does it work with the many other substances that appear to be important in creating a memory?
“There is not going to be one, single memory molecule, the system is just not that simple,” said
Yet as scientists begin to climb out of the dark foothills and into the dim light, they are now poised to alter the understanding of human nature in ways artists and writers have not.
Let The Sun Shine In......
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