Ethics

Advances in Selective Memory Erasure

By Adam Kolber

On the heels of a paper in Science a few weeks ago, entitled Selective Erasure of a Fear Memory, today's New York Times has a front page story about a different, seemingly-quite-promising approach to selective memory control.  The New York Times article, Brain Researchers Open Door to Editing Unwanted Memory, discusses an advance by researchers studying rodent memory at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, led by Todd Sacktor. 

Apparently, one of the 100+ molecules known to play a role in memory, called PKMZeta, can be inhibited by a drug called ZIP.  Here's how the NYT article summarizes the research:

In an experiment, rats placed on a rotating platform learned to avoid a small stationary area that delivered electric shocks.  The next day their brains were injected with either saline or ZIP.  When placed on the platform, the saline-injected rats remembered to avoid the shock zone, but the ZIP-injected rats forgot what they had learned.

When I wrote a law review article on memory dampening, most attention focused on the drug propranolol as a possible method of dampening the emotional intensity of recent traumatic memories in humans.  And this is still where memory-dampening research on humans is focused.  Fortunately, most of my article focuses on hypothetical memory dampening/erasing substances.  Here's a free link to the law review article, Therapeutic Forgetting: The Legal and Ethical Implications of Memory Dampening (that Marc Blitz was kind enough to highlight in his recent post on freedom of thought).

Full post as published by Neuroethics and Law on April 06, 2009 (boomark / email).