BOSTON: Inside a fifth-floor lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a 76-year-old neuroscientist is helping to reinvent psychiatry by hotwiring the brains of mice.
Susumu Tonegawa has figured out how to reverse symptoms of depression in moody male rodents by reactivating the happy memories they created days earlier during a bit of sexual frolicking with female mice. He injects a modified, light-sensitive gene into those happy-memory cells, then uses fiber optics to switch on the memories with a stream of blue light. The depressed mice perk up in seconds. When he turns the light off, their lethargy rapidly returns. Another flip of the switch, and they’re active again.
“We cured their depression,” he says.
Tonegawa’s approach in creating and manipulating memory cells has drawn praise from a normally staid academic community. Beyond those institutional confines, the potential of a radical new tool to treat one of the most complex mental illnesses could be a game-changer in psychiatry…