Of mice and men - and memory

By SIMON COLLINS science reporter

Help could be on the way for people who find it harder to remember things as they get older.

A Nobel Prize-winning scientist, Dr Eric Kandel, told an overflow crowd of 700 people at Auckland University yesterday that his New York team had found a drug that worked in mice and was now being tested on people.

"If you are a mouse, we can handle your age-related memory loss," he said. "My colleagues and I have started a company, Memory Pharmaceuticals, which is in stage one clinical trials for drugs to restore age-related memory loss for humans."

The company's website says the drug, "Mem 1003", prevents calcium building up in brain cells and makes the cells more responsive to incoming signals.

It is targeted at the 30 per cent of older people who gradually find it harder to remember things, sometimes from their early forties, but never develop full-blown Alzheimer's.

"They often have very good short-term memory, and good memory for things that happened a long time ago, but can't remember recent events, and some find difficulty with handling multiple tasks," Dr Kandel said.

At 74, Dr Kandel himself seems to have lost none of his mental faculties and has just published new findings that long-term memories may be stored by compounds called prions, known until now mainly for their role in fatal illnesses such as mad cow disease.

He was born into a Jewish family in Vienna and suffered in the explosion of anti-Semitism that erupted after Nazi Germany occupied Austria when he was 8.

"The day after Hitler marched into Vienna, every one of my non-Jewish classmates - the entire class with the exception of one girl - stopped talking and interacting with me. In the park where I played, I was taunted and roughed up," he has written. "I am struck, as others have been, at how deeply these traumatic events of my childhood became burned into memory."

That sudden transformation of "civilised" people into bullies "helped to determine my later interests in the mind, in how people behave, the unpredictability of motivation, and the persistence of memory".

Dr Kandel's family fled to the US a few months after the Nazi invasion.

His key scientific breakthrough came through studying the simple sea snail, which has 20,000 brain cells compared with 100 billion in the human brain.

He showed that the creature built up its memory of being touched, and therefore its ability to close up in response, by strengthening the connections between its brain cells.

Later studies in mice, monkeys and humans found the same pattern of learning by strengthening links between brain cells, showing that our brains develop physically with every extra thing we learn.

"Every person in this auditorium has had different life experiences and therefore has a unique brain," he told the Auckland audience.

He said the drug was not a cure for full Alzheimer's and also warned against trying to develop a drug that could enhance normal memory - allowing students, for example, to remember more facts for exams.

"Education is a perfectly good way to get people's minds to sharpen."