CAN A PILL MAKE YOU SMART?  
by Susan Jacoby

What if there were a pill that would make it easier to learn a new language or computer program or simply to remember where you put your gloves? Although no such drug exists today—and most experts say none will come to market for at least four or five years—the quest to improve memory through chemistry has become one of the hottest areas of medical research. The first goal of researchers is to find treatments for memory problems related to Alzheimer’s disease, aging and illness.

“It’s a matter of when, not if, memory drugs are going to reach the market," says Tim Tulley, geneticist with the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, N.Y., and acting chief scientific officer of the biotech company Helicon Therapeutics. Helicon is one of several firms exploring ways in which the brain transfers short-term memories collected in the hippocampus to the prefrontal cortex, where long-term memories are stored.

The drugs in development aim to switch on brain proteins essential to converting short-term into long-term memory or to block chemicals that impede the formation of the proteins. “To put it simply, we’re trying to open up the-neural pathways that work less efficiently with age,” says Randall Carpenter M.D., chief executive of Sention Inc., a biotech company based in Providence, RI. Sention’s memory drug is in its second year of human clinical trials with participants ages 50 to 80.

Researchers also hope that such drugs will ease memory loss caused by medical conditions— such as stroke—and by treatments like heart bypass surgery and chemotherapy. Tully says conventional stroke rehabilitation depends on exercising the brain to encourage undamaged areas to take over the functions of stroke-damaged areas. “What memory drugs could do is shorten this process,” he explains.

Many people might also welcome medications that boost normal memory—say, to cram for an exam—but that possibility raises ethical questions. “My view,” says Scott A. Small, M.D., of the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior at Columbia University Medical Center, “is that it’s ethical to use these drugs at the point where memory problems interfere with our ability to function normally.”

So far, memory impairment— whatever its cause—has been underdiagnosed, chiefly because there has been no effective treatment for it. “Neither doctors nor patients like to own up to what can’t be treated,’ Carpenter says. “That will change on the day doctors are able to say, ‘There’s something we can do to help you.’”