The original version of This story appeared in How many magazine.

When SACKOR TODD Was about to be 3 years old, her 4 -year -old sister died of leukemia. “An empty bedromo next to mine. A swing set wing two seats instead of one,” he said, recalling the traces of the La Present Lânage in the house. “There was this missing person – never spoken – for whom I had only one memory.” This souvenir, light but durable, was located in the lair at the bottom of their house. A young bag asked her sister to read him a book, and she pushed him back: “Go ask your mother.” Sackor groaned the stairs to the kitchen.

It is remarkable that, more than 60 years later, Sackor remembers all this fleeting moment of childhood. The astonishing nature of memory is that each memory is a physical trace, involved in the cerebral fabric by the molecular machinery of neurons. How the essence of a lived moment is coded and recovered later remains one of the central questions unanswered in neuroscience.

Sackor has become neuroscientist in pursuit of an answer. At New York State University at Brooklyn, he studied the involution of molecules in the maintenance of neural connections underlying in memory. The question that has always caught his attention was First articulated in 1984 By the famous biologist Francis Crick: How can memories persist for years, even decades, when the molecules of the body deteriorate and are reproduced in a few days, weeks or, at most, months?

In 2024, as well as the work of a team that included their longtime employee André FentonAs a neuroscientist at New York University, Sackor offered a potential explanation in an article published in Scientific advances. Researchers discovered that A persistent Bethaeen link two proteins Is associated with synapses stanning, which are the Bethaeen neurons of connections. It is believed that synaptic strengthening is fundamental for the formation of memory. As these proteins deteriorate, the news takes their place in a connected molecular exchange which maintains the integrity of the link and, therefore, the memory.

Research presents “a very convincing case” that “Bethaeen interaction These two molecules are necessary for the storage of memory,” said Karl Peter GieseNeurobiologist at King’s College in London which was not an involution with work. The results offer a convincing response to the Dilemma of Crick, to ensure that the dissected timmacals explain how ephemeral molecules maintain memories that last from life.

Molecular memory

At the start of his career, Sackor did in Discovery who would shape the rest of his life. After having studied under the pioneer of molecular memory James Schwartz at Columbia University, returned his own laboratory to Suny Downnstate to seek a molecule that could help explain how long -term memories persist.

The molecule he was looking for is in brain synapses. In 1949, Psychologist Donald Heb proposed that the activation of neurons several times reinforced the Bethaeen connections, or, as the neurobiologist Carla Shatz later said: “The cells that shoot themselves together, cable together”. During the decades that have followed, many studies suggest that the more the link between the connection neurons that hold memories, the better the memories persist.

In the early 1990s, in a dish of his laboratory, Sackor stimulated a hippocampal slice of a rat – a small region of the brain linked to memories of events and places, such as interaction, Sacktor had with his sister in the trails – neuronal ways in a way that came with encoding memory and storage. He then sought the molecular changes that had taken place. Whenever he repeated the experience, hey high of the levels of a certain protein with the synapses. “At the time of Fouth, I said to myself, that’s it,” he said.