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RESCUING
MEMORY A Talk with Steven Rose [6.14.99] What has always obsessed British biologist Steven Rose is the relationship between mind and brain. His approach to understanding this relationship has been to look for ways in which we can locate changes in behavior, thought, or action, which can be mapped in some way onto changes in physiology and biochemistry, and changes in structure in the brain, that is in processes that you can study biologically. For most of his life the search has been focused on how we should understand learning and memory. Rose points out that the reason for this is obvious. He is an experimental scientist. "I work with animals," he says, "and when an experimental animal learns, it changes its behavior. And it's always easier to measure change than stasis in science. You can then ask what changes happen in the brain when an animal learns a particular task, and you can study those changes in ways that we can manipulate in the laboratory. When I started doing this, back in the late 60s, early 70s, this was a deeply unfashionable field. People thought these were questions beyond the edge of science, you couldn't actually touch them. Now it's the hottest area in neuroscience." Steve and I got together in New York after he attended the memory meeting at Cold Spring Harbor, which is the home of molecular biology and molecular genetics. "Jim Watson decided a few years ago that the focus of neuroscience should be learning and memory," he said, "and he started setting up molecular techniques and genetic techniques there, with some very bright guys working on it. They have a conference every two years, and we have a matching conference in Britain and across the rest of Europe. And these are the questions which now we're beginning to approach for molecular answers." At Cold Spring Harbor, Rose was talking about his discovery of a new molecule "which seems to be able to rescue the memory loss that you get with the disorder of the Alzheimer proteins. What started as a sheer intellectual excitement also looks like it's going to have rather significant human payoff, and that's good news." |
