ROSE: Within some months from now I suspect. What we haven't done is patent it.

JB: For ideological reasons?

ROSE: I suppose so, yes.

JB: Then somebody will come and patent it.

ROSE: No, they can't once it's published. You can only patent it if it's new. Patent law is a bit different in Europe. I have to say that a fair number of my molecular neuroscience colleagues, mainly on this side of the water, have got companies in which they're trying to develop molecules which will do this sort of thing. That's fine, but I would prefer to publish in the scientific press and develop things that way.

JB: Did you see the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Total Recall ? How long will it be before you begin to implant memories?

ROSE: That's a different story. People are unclear about what we mean by a memory-enhancing drug. If you go to the smart bars in San Francisco and buy a smart drug, a memory drug (none of which work, I have to say, but they're good marketing for the health food stores and bars) what you don't get is something which will give you someone else's memory, or even bring back memories you lost when you were just a few years old. What they do is they help in the transition from short- to long-term memory.

If you take someone with Alzheimer's Disease, then the first problems that people notice are things like you don't know where you've left your car keys, whether you've done your shopping this morning, whether you know the person who's ringing your front doorbell. The early stages of the disease are stages in which you will remember things for a few minutes but then you will forget them. What we need to do is find a way of helping people in the early stages of Alzheimer's Disease to remain in the community rather than have to be in care. To do that they need to be able to hold their short-term memory. Most of the so-called smart drugs are looking at doing that.

Further downstream there's the question of why do people get Alzheimer's Disease in the first place? Is there something we can do by way of neuro-protection? Is there something you can take like you take Vitamin E or half an aspirin, something like that which will build up some protection. Interestingly, the best evidence for neuro-protection comes not out of the lab but out of epidemiology. It turns out that post-menopausal women who are on HRT are much less likely to get Alzheimer's Disease than if they're not on HRT, and that has to do with estrogen, although it's probably not estrogen itself in the brain.

What happens is that the sex hormones, the steroids, are converted in the brain into things called neuro-steroids, brain steroids. My guess is that if we're going towards neuro-protection there will be an interaction between these peptides I'm looking at, the neuro-steroids, and some other growth factors in the brain. So it will be possible to get a cocktail of processes which will be able to provide neuro protection in this sort of way. That will be the long-term aim.

There are a lot of risk factors for Alzheimer's Disease. Some of them are genetic, or in other cases there are genes you've got that are risk factors, and they will interact with things in the environment. The proteins that we're looking at are the risk factors for Alzheimer's Disease. They are proteins called presenilin, the amyloid precursor protein and so on. Somehow there's an interaction between whether you've got these proteins, whether you have some problems — for example if you've had concussion as a kid, you've been involved in a football game and banged your head or had a car accident, or you've had general anaesthesia, you are more likely to get Alzheimer's when you're old than if you've had none of those things. So there's a whole lot of environmental risk factors. How they play together no-one knows.

JB: How does this line of research play into Darwinian ideas?