It may be possible for doctors to cure alcoholics or treat people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder with a simple injection. This is the hope of research being done at the State University of New York (SUNY) at its Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn.
Memory-Blocking Chemical
The New York Times reported on April 5, 2009 that, “…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.” That substance is called PKMzeta.
The research is being carried out by Dr. Todd C. Sacktor and his colleague Dr. André A. Fenton. So far, their work has only been on animals, but they have shown that a particular “drug blocks the activity of a substance that the brain apparently needs to retain much of its learned information.”
They tested this by teaching laboratory animals how to navigate around their enclosure. Tiny electric shocks delivered to the animal’s feet taught them safe routes to certain objects. Once they had memorized the route they didn’t forget it; putting them back in the enclosure a month later, the animals quickly remembered how to steer clear of the electric shocks.
However, once injected with a drug called ZIP, which blocks the effectiveness of those PKMzeta molecules, the animals were completely lost. Their memories had been erased. This experiment, in different forms, has since been repeated at other institutions with similar results.
The scientists doing the research say there’s no reason this memory-blocking won’t be equally effective in humans.
Dr. Sacktor told The New York Times: “If this molecule is as important as it appears to be, you can see the possible implications. For trauma. For addiction, which is a learned behaviour. Ultimately for improving memory and learning.”
Research Raises Ethical Questions
Cutting-edge brain research such as that carried out at SUNY presents society with many moral dilemmas:
- If memories can be cleared of harmful learned behaviours, who should receive the therapy?
- If someone is abusive toward a partner because the behaviour was learned from parental example, should treatment be forced on that person?
- If researchers develop a drug that enhances memory should it be available to everyone?
- Should research be halted before society reaches a Brave-New-World scenario in which personalities seen as “disagreeable” are controlled by chemicals?
- If difficult memories can be edited out could someone who committed a crime have all knowledge of it erased and how would that affect the criminal justice system?
- All experiences, good and bad, accumulate to form a personality; would removing the bad memories create one-dimensional characters?
- If mental “abnormalities” can be “corrected” would not the world be robbed of some of its most creative minds? If such therapies had been available in the past we might have lost Beethoven’s music (bipolar disorder), Eugene O’Neill’s plays (depression), or Jack Kerouac’s writing (schizophrenia), among many others.
Enormous Promise
The Holy Grail for neuroscientists doing this kind of work is a cure for Alzheimer’s Disease. As Dr. Sacktor told The New York Times: “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. But these are only ideas at this stage.”
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