WHY ARE YOU ALTERING SNAILS’ MEMORIES, Dr. Glanzman?

Although they’re the perfect product of evolution for the role they play in nature’s hierarchy, snails are nevertheless pretty dumb in human terms. That has made them the ideal subject for research conducted by Dr. David Glanzman, a professor of integrative biology, physiology, and neurobiology at UCLA. Because they have very large neurons and are easy to observe, snails have been studied by memory scientists for decades. Human neural networks are more difficult to study because experiments on living people are practically impossible to conduct. Fortunately, memories are formed in similar ways in a wide variety of species at the molecular level. Making use of that fact, Glanzman has applied mild electric shocks to the tails of a species of marine snail, Aplysia californica: A series of five shocks, one every two minutes, and then one day later a second series of five shocks. (A control group received no shocks.) When the shells of the first group were later tapped, they contracted for much longer than those that had not been shocked at all. Then the researchers transplanted RNA from the first group to the second. The second group then began to display the same reactions as the snails that had been shocked. The discovery that memories can be transmitted via RNA suggests the technique may be useful in restoring lost memories or lessening the trauma of painful ones. “In the not-too-distant future, we could potentially use RNA to ameliorate the effects of Alzheimer’s or PTSD,” says Glanzman.