The Sciences May/June 1996 [antikvár]

Initial Conditions EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK 1 ;I. ' ' ; I I, .1 i" , i ll'i, ,i ilVi:;'':;:-'^'; I- i/ I I I i : ' i , • ¦>. ' ' ,v I / ii ' ¦ I , 'm ' In April 1982, almost fourteen years ago to the day as 1 write this, a flying object punched a hole in my memory. It was a warm Friday evening, the end of a week's labor, and pickup games of baseball and volleyball were winding down as I pedaled my bicycle through fading light in New York City's Central Park. The next thing I knew, I was semiconscious on a hospital gumey, asking for a telephone and giving out a number I wanted to call with what I thought was perfect lucidity. I learned later on that my self-perceptions were badly askew: my requests for a telephone repeated monotonously, and my syntax was garbled. 1 could remember the early parts of the bike ride, then nothing. Later, I reconstructed a dreamlike memory of reflexively stopping the bike, dismounting and then collapsing. My injuries were not serious and were consistent with the impact of a baseball thrown at the head. But I never learned for sure what hit me, and to this day there are about five hours of dreamless life I cannot account for. Tim Tully, the coauthor, with John B. Connolly, of "You Must Remember This," our cover story for this issue (page 37), recounts a similar, though much more serious, memory loss following a sledding accident in his childhood. And it is easy, from my limited experience, to appreciate the fascination memory has had for him ever since. Take away memory, and there is nothing: not pain, not time, not self, not even the experience of loss (that comes later, after experiences firom various times begin to knit back together again). Connolly and Tully describe a series of brilliant experiments in which they combine classical associative conditioning with late-twenneth-century genetics to tease out the behavioral components of memory in the firuit fly. The difficulty of arranging a suitable experimental design to test such an animal was more than compensated for by the hundred years of fi^it fly generics Connolly, Tully and their coworkers then had at their disposal. They have now put together the pieces of an elegant puzzle: they have found a generic counterpart to each of the behavioral components of memory. In particular, they show that one gene acts as the gatekeeper for long-term memory: activate the gene, and the memory is etched in the brain; suppress the gene, and all the training in the world is as good as writing on water. The memory genes in the fruit fly bear a striking resemblance to genetic counterparts in people, though the functions of the human genes are not yet determined. So here's a puzzler. Assume the obvious technology becomes a reality: suppose pharmacology formulates a simple pill for enhancing long-term, permanent memory in human beings. What spectrum of effects could such a pill give rise to in individuals? And what are the most prominent uses, and abuses, to which the substance might be put? The best pubUshable 1,500-word essay addressing those questions wins a $100 honorarium and a byUne in this magazine. I am delighted to report to you that THE SCIENCES has just been nominated for the National Magazine Award for General Excellence among magazines with circulations of less than 100,000. Recognition by a National Magazine Award is the most prestigious prize in magazine journalism, and our nomination this year is our tenth in the past twelve years (we have won it twice). The winner will be announced April 23, after we go to press. —Peter. G. Brown