Health: The "Rise" of the Fruit Fly; Inside the latest memory research

Christmas Day in 1968.

Presents had been opened and now it was game time. So the gang gathered at the top of a hill behind the Tully house to play a variation of chicken they’d invented more suited for this unique terrain. The object was to drive other sledders over a fearsome overhang the kids called the “cliff.” The playing field consisted of a gentle slope running north to south along three yards. (The Tully house was in the middle.) At the back of these yards was a ridgeline, below which the terrain dropped twenty-five feet, at an angle of roughly 80 degrees. This fall concluded about a third of the way down, with a sheer, ten-foot drop onto the frozen creek below.

That day, Tully, 14 at the time, was having a blast, barreling down the hill on his Flexible Flyer, yelling and raising hell—when a good blow from a competitor sent him hurtling over the side of that steep cliff head first. Feeling daring, Tully made a snap decision to forgo normal evacuation procedures. Instead, he decided to enjoy it. There was, in his estimation, between two and three feet of snow on the ground in front of him, which he figured would cushion the reckoning when he finished his descent at the bottom. Clutching the sides of his sled tightly, he hunkered down. It probably would have worked were it not for a buried tree stump, obscured by the snow. When the sled hit the stump, Tully was catapulted forward into a series of airborne acrobatics and ground-smacking somersaults so improbable they would become a permanent part of neighborhood lore.

In the process, Tully slammed his knee into his face and knocked himself unconscious. Months later, after the snow had melted, he would return to the site and find one of his front teeth, still attached to its root, lying in the grass. Tully had no memory of losing it. In fact, Tully had no memory of the events of that day at all. Remarkably, when he’d awoken groggy and concussed in a bed back home, his mouth swollen shut, Tully was certain it was the Friday two weeks prior. Somehow, he had “lost” the previous 14 days. It was as if the accident had wiped part of Tully’s hard drive clean. His memory gap was so solid, his insistence on the incorrect date so unyielding, that his parents rewrapped his Christmas gifts so he could experience the joy of opening them anew.

In the years that followed and into his college years, Tully would often contemplate the mysteries of recall and wonder about that sled ride. How was it that a knock on the head could cause his memory of two full weeks to disappear? And if new memories were discrete things that could be separated from the rest of our experiences and somehow erased just like that, might it be possible to do the opposite—to capture new experiences and instead somehow imbue them with the instant clarity and permanence of a painting or a photograph? Might it be possible to reverse the inevitable decline in recall we all seem to face as we age? Was there a way to untangle the mysteries of memory?

Today Tim Tully is at the forefront of efforts not just to unlock the many secrets of memory, but to go far beyond. With the backing of a reclusive billionaire who is prepared to kick in up to $2 billion to fund the scheme, Tully is attempting to create and win approval for drugs that might someday allow all of us to function with superior recall and minimize those dreaded “senior moments.” He is, in other words, attempting to artificially produce the opposite effect of a tooth-rattling, concussion-inducing knee to the face. Tim Tully is making a “memorization pill.”
 

This is where the journey that began on that steep cliff more than four decades ago has led. Today Tully is at the forefront of efforts not just to unlock the many secrets of memory, but to go far beyond. With the backing of a reclusive billionaire who is prepared to kick in up to $2 billion to fund the scheme, Tully is attempting to create and win approval for drugs that might someday allow all of us to function with superior recall and minimize those dreaded “senior moments.” He is, in other words, attempting to artificially produce the opposite effect of a tooth-rattling, concussion-inducing knee to the face. Tim Tully is making a “memorization pill.”

That it is possible to find a way to give us all something like photographic memories, Tully has no doubt. He has already done so in fruit flies, mice, and other mammals.

“Oh, we’ll find it,” he says. “Don’t worry about that.”

 Tully is now standing outside his company’s new deli/lunchroom, which, he informs me, can be opened up to seat three hundred. I may have seen it on the news—it’s used for more than just meals. Once a year the lunchroom serves as the arena for the Dart Neuro-Science “Extreme Memory Tournament (XMT),” an annual contest that draws some of the world’s top mental athletes from far and wide to this out-of-the-way San Diego office park to show just how far memory can be pushed. The 2015 contest offered $76,000 in prize money and drew finalists from Germany, Sweden, the Philippines—even from the up-and-coming Mongolian national team. The feats of recall on display were truly astounding. To win, contestants tried to remember 80 random digits, 50 randomly ordered words, 30 pictures, and 30 face-name pairs, among other things.
To win the two-day, 2015 tournament finals, Johannes Mallow, a diminutive, 33-year-old German, memorized 80 digits in 21.01 seconds. Fellow German Simon Reinhard set the record for cards—memorizing 52 cards in 23.34 seconds. Enkhjin Tumur, a 17-year-old from Mongolia, memorized the order of 30 pictures after studying them for just 14.40 seconds.

 The memory tournament is just one part of an unprecedented global hunt for genetic variants that offer superior memory abilities. Today more than ever, Tully is convinced that by understanding the genetics of those with superior memory, he can find ways to enhance it in the rest of us. If Tully finds mutations in genes coding for specific proteins involved in memory, he believes, he can replicate the effects of the mutation with small molecular compounds created using his 800,000-strong molecular library.

Dart’s operations and reach are truly sprawling. Dart has also opened a second research facility in western China, three and a half hours by plane due west of Shanghai in “the middle of nowhere.” Dart NeuroScience is helping pay for the research of collaborators at, among other places, New York University, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Alberta, and National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan.

“The NIH,” Tully notes, “only funds people to study dysfunction, so nobody’s ever studied superior memorization. It’s really cool to see the academic community is totally fascinated by this stuff.”

But the surprising truth is that Dart’s most potent weapon might be in this modest little corner of the building, and the modest little organisms that reside here—fruit flies. Several times during our tour, Tully has marveled at his good fortune, looking around at his dream facility, and uttered the same sentence he now repeats in that dark hallway half in pride, half in something like disbelief.

“I mean, I’m just a fly guy!”

And it’s true. None of it would have been possible without them

 Studying fruit flies might seem an indirect route to unlocking the secrets of human memory and scouring the globe for humans with the most remarkable recall. It might seem entirely irrelevant to the feats of mental athletes, Greek philosophers, and Blind Tom, the 19^th century blind savant who played the piano at the White House.

But in fact, in the mid ’90s, using the tools of modern genetics, Tully pulled off a feat that to many of his peers seemed every bit as exciting as anything these men ever did. Tully demonstrated he could give fruit flies the capacity to form the functional equivalent of photographic memories.

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So far, Tully and his team have had six drugs in clinical studies. Two have been terminated for toxicity-related issues. Four remain in the pipeline. Tully is tight-lipped about exactly what kind of compounds he has created so far.

-Excerpted from Adam Piore's The Body Builders:Inside the Science of the Engineered Human