Scientists pinpoint single chemical responsible for memory.

Forget Me Not Maybe

Sergeant Jonathan Ramirez never returned from the battlefields of Iraq. Unlike his less fortunate comrades, a man who looked like Sergeant Ramirez did return- not in a body bag- but in the shell of the man he once was. The once fearless community leader hits the deck at the sound of a slammed door. He can barely sleep for an hour every night. The twisted images that consume him make the most gruesome horror film look like Disney. The incessant haunting twists his every thought, but what if they could be erased?

The puzzle of memory has perplexed thinkers since ancient times. Until recently, little was known about the process of how memories are stored and recorded. With breakthroughs in technology, neuroscience has become a leading field of research- consuming 20% of the National Institute of Health total budget. With so little known and so many questions, the neuroscience research frontier pushes farther and farther towards knowledge. Specifically, the removal of memory, once postulated as the equivalence of death of identity by Locke and more recently explored by Jim Carey in the Academy Award winning Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, has advanced leaps and bounds and has reached its most specific conclusion.

In 1999, researchers at Harvard listed 117 molecules they found to be involved in the process of forming and storing memory. A decade later, Dr. Todd C. Sacktor and André A. Fenton at SUNY Downstate Medical Center have recently reported the discovery of a single chemical in the neurons of the hippocampus that the entire process of memory storage depends on. This molecule has been named PKMzeta and has been called by the New York Times as an “open door to editing memory.” Dr. Fenton, a special memory in mice and rats expert, devised a study to determine the effects of using ZIP to inhibit the PKMzeta. Fenton discovered that using ZIP, mice trained to avoid an electric shock would forget what the previously learned. This lead to many follow up studies which confirmed the original finding with some studies erasing memories up to a month old in rats and mice.

While they have only experimented with PKMzeta’s role in the deletion of memory, its discovery is a breakthrough in the understanding of how memories are stored and could possibly the Pandora’s Box of memory manipulation. From treatments to Post Truamatic Stress Disorder, to saving the memory of Alzheimer’s patients, to implanting knowledge into the mind, the study of the memory process is as limitless as it is controversial. Though PKMzeta research is still ways away from research in humans, this discovery could be the key that unlocks the “arms-race” of neuroenhancement.