We don’t know a lot about how the brain works. Broadly speaking, we know what brain region is responsible for action/sense/emotion, and so on. We know the amygdala is responsible for fear, but at a cellular level we know a lot less, because, well, the brain is difficult to access and exists in an environment completely separate to other body parts. The technology needed to properly understand some aspects of the brain also didn’t exist until rather recently.
Dr Tomas Ryan, a Trinity neuroscientist based in the Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute (TBSI), is one researcher taking a different approach to further understanding human cognition, specifically how memory is stored as information in the brain. Ryan is asking the question: how is an individual memory stored? At a macroscopic level we know that if you were to interfere with the fusiform gyrus, part of the temporal and occipital lobes, of a person, they will have trouble recognising all of their facial memories, but Ryan is less interested in that and more so in understanding how a particular memory of one person you know is very different from a memory of another person and how that is stored in a specific manner.
Change is constantly occurring in the brain, some of which has nothing to do with memory, and identifying only the memory-related changes is quite the challenge
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Thanks to technology developed during his five years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, called memory engram labelling technology, it is now possible to properly address this question. As humans are materialists in our thinking, it is first assumed that a memory must be accounted for by some material change in the brain and it is this material change that is broadly defined as a memory engram. One issue, though, is that change is constantly occurring in the brain, some of which has nothing to do with memory, and identifying only the memory-related changes is quite the challenge.
It must also be assumed that the memory exists in cells which are active at the time it is being generated. Memory engram technology allows you to tag those cells genetically and then to manipulate them and study them thereafter. By hijacking certain genes, known as Immediate Early Genes, and tagging them with optogenetic receptors, which are light receptors, they can essentially control brain cell activity remotely by using light.
The goal is “ultimately to get to the same degree of explanation as we have for genetic information”, explains Ryan. “So, take as an analogy, early molecular and cellular biology”, he adds, noting that there had been in the past a debate about the means of examining the brain, “about whether or not genes were stored as proteins or as DNA, and [whether they had] gone in simply breaking things, simply interfering with things and watching what was going on”. He adds that “it was thinking about genes as information that allowed biologists working with really crude techniques at the time to be able to try figure out that DNA was storing genes, and I think that the same sort of informational approach is necessary if we are to begin to understand memory in the brain, that is at a fundamental level”.
The flipside of the coin is to look at amnesia. Amnesia is broadly defined as a deficit in memory function. However, any given kind of amnesia could be due to the fact that the memory has been lost from the brain, which is the standard assumption, or alternatively, the memory may still be in the brain but locked-in, so that would be an access deficit. Ryan’s work at MIT has shown that many cases of amnesia in rodents is in fact due to memory access deficits – the memory is still in the brain but you can’t get at it. This changes how the biology of memory is viewed, but also certain cases of amnesia because it means in many cases of human amnesia the memory may simply be trapped in the brain. “We just need to get at it, so another part of this type of research would be to try and understand that aspect of things”, says Ryan.
A big part of why I was so enthused about coming back to Ireland, was the marriage equality referendum. I think a lot of Irish people in the diaspora were extremely proud of what the Irish people did at that point in time
Ryan here mentions his reasons for returning to Ireland, having completed his undergraduate degree in genetics at Trinity. The decision was made before the US presidential election results, but the outcome made leaving that bit easier. Many factors came into the decision to return: “A big part of why I was so enthused about coming back to Ireland, from a social perspective, was the marriage equality referendum. I think a lot of Irish people in the diaspora were extremely proud of what the Irish people did at that point in time.”
Ryan notes that he was “not only proud but surprised, and that in itself gave me a great deal of hope that the there would be a significant degree of social progress in the coming years, which made me less concerned about the immediate reality of the oppressive health regime for women in this country”.
He points out “the scientific environment in the good universities in the US is so permissive for physically doing anything and there is an intensity with which things get done”. In recent times, however, there has been a huge increase in the number of scientists and there simply isn’t enough money to support them all. Funding for established labs is also becoming problematic, Ryan notes, as you can “only get money if you’re doing what’s popular, what everyone else is doing, and I think this stifles creativity in the science and I think it also creates a culture, a collegial culture that is quite toxic”.
The problem extends beyond graduates and working scientists. A lot of students that are being trained in this culture are not allowed to be motivated by their own scientific curiosity or by their own interests. Instead, they are being motivated by extrinsic factors that are focused solely on productivity, productivity that appears to be glamourous and which can be published in glamorous journals. “This is all the time, everywhere, so I think, the political situation of the United States aside, there are huge issues with trying to survive in American academia right now.”
So why Ireland, and not the UK? “What impresses me about science in Ireland is just how well some people do here. I mean, it’s really a country that, maybe it’s an overused cliché, but a country that does punch above its weight, and why is that? Why is it that, individually, there are so many good people here?” He puts it down to three reasons. The first is that you need money to succeed, and here in Ireland you can access money from the European Research Council (ERC), Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), the Wellcome Trust in England and many Irish and UK-based agencies and charities.
Funding, freedom and good people is what I think made this a very attractive place to set up a group. I would say more attractive than many places in the UK or Germany even
The other reason why he thinks Ireland is a good work environment for scientists is because it’s a very non-restrictive place. If you take somewhere like Trinity, Ryan says, you can come and set up a research group and “really do whatever you want”. This is “not typical in the United States”, with Ryan explaining that you can get a position here if “you can get the grant” and in turn “you can do anything that interests you”. The story in the US, however, is different: “If you were in the US, it’s not just the grant/funding agencies that are restrictive, but the universities themselves want people to be doing a particular thing, what’s sexy at that particular time. It’s focused on methods rather than questions. Freedom is definitely something that the Irish academic environment offers people.”
Ryan also thinks there are some exceptional students at Trinity and ample opportunities to recruit strong PhD students. “Funding, freedom and good people is what I think made this a very attractive place to set up a group. I would say more attractive than many places in the UK or Germany even.”
There are certainly advantages to being in the US system, despite all the things said. Ryan notes that “there are obvious advantages to being in a place like that, but in comparison to the UK, I really don’t feel at all disadvantaged by being here over the UK. Not at all. There are certainly some places in the UK, like Oxford or Cambridge, that carry a certain higher degree of prestige, but in actual practical work, the reality of running a research group, for me, it seemed completely fair that I could have a better situation in Dublin”.
