UNDERSTANDING MEMORY.

Today, we have advanced prosthetics that can replace limbs with devices of uncanny agility, but when it comes to traumatic brain injuries, scientists and physicians have few options. A memory prosthetic would change that. Deadwyler and Hampson believe it’s possible to create a device that will help individuals with brain injuries and memory loss from Alzheimer’s and other dementias improve their ability to learn and remember. Although they have spent the last decade testing it in rats and monkeys, they hope to test it in humans in the near future.

The idea wasn’t always popular. “It sounded too much like science fiction. People told us they wanted to believe that we could do this, but they just didn’t think we could,” Deadwyler says.

That’s certainly changed in recent years. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and UCLA are also working on a prosthetic memory device, which works by boosting our ability to store a memory rather than recall it later, as Deadwyler and Hapson’s device does. Regardless of which aspects of memory affected by the prosthetics, several researchers say it’s an idea whose time has come. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, agrees and has provided $37.5 million to fund the new Restoring Active Memory (RAM) Project.

But memory prosthetics have also caught the attention of ethicists. Helping those with brain injuries is a noble quest, they argue, but altering memory could fundamentally change who a person is. Who should be helped first? What kind of injuries would benefit most? And where do we draw the line?

There are a lot of issues there.