Scientists ‘transplant memories’ in an injection

IT SOUNDS like the plot of a science fiction film: in a radical experiment, one character’s memories are moved to another’s brain.

But fantasy is closer to becoming reality after neuroscientists were able to transfer a memory from one animal into another.

The memory was the recollection of being given a mild electric shock, in sea slugs zapped repeatedly for two days. When material from their brains was injected into sea slugs that had never been shocked they reacted exactly the same way to the weak touch of a wire.

The results suggest memories can be physically transferred, and follow claims from experiments in the 1960s that this could lead to ‘memory pills’ or jabs.

The authors of the latest study, from the University of California in Los Angeles, say it could lead to a treatment to block unwanted memories – just like in the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The study says its results offer ‘dramatic support’ for the idea that memory can be stored in ribonucleic acid, or RNA – the ‘biochemical cousin’ of DNA which is used to copy and transport our genetic code.

‘Our results suggest that RNA could eventually be used to modify, either enhance or depress, memories,’ it says.

The UCLA scientists, led by Professor David Glanzman, observed that the frightened sea slugs learned to pull their gills into their body in response to an electric shock. Untrained slugs, which should have been unafraid of an electrical wire, also retracted their gills after being injected in the necks with RNA from the frightened slugs.

Other slugs, not given the injections, did not react, according to the study, published in the journal eNeuro.

Professor George Kemenes, of the University of Sussex, said: ‘It might give rise to novel treatment to eliminate memories related to post-traumatic stress syndrome or to alleviate memory loss caused by dementia, but that could be a long time away.’