Memory Pills

Though they are not yet available for prescription, and are not likely to be for a long time, "Abbott's memory pills" are the subject of growing enthusiasm among brain researchers. Until last week, the only evidence of the pills' ef fectiveness had been supplied by experi ments with rats; now there is encour aging preliminary evidence, reports Psy chiatrist D. Ewen Cameron, that the pills may help to mend the fraying mem ory of aging humans.

Dr. Cameron gave the pills, trade-named Cylert by North Chicago's Abbott Laboratories, as tough a test as he could devise. For subjects he chose men aged 49 to 85 whose memories had been impaired by severe hardening of the brain's arteries or by the deterioration of aging generally known as senile psychosis. He divided his 24 patients at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Albany into two equal groups and gave half of them Cylert for the first week while the other half got an identical-looking placebo (sugar pill). Neither doctors nor nurses knew which was which in this "double-blind" study. The drug and placebo groups were switched for the second week.

"Baby Cries." In movies shown to the Society of Biological Psychiatry, it was clear that some patients, after taking Cylert, made more accurate drawings of objects recently shown to them, showed more decisiveness about what they remembered, and recalled things faster than those who had taken a placebo. On a standard seven-item memory test, most of the men under 70 showed a significant improvement in memory for visual presentations (like the drawing test) and for pairing of words (such as "baby" and "cries").

Abbott Laboratories commented with commendable caution that "it is still a long road from these first results to the ultimate evaluation in humans of an experimental drug of this type." Equally cautious was the University of Michigan's Dr. John Burns, who has been testing healthy subjects, mostly students, to find out whether Cylert can improve the normal memory of the young. Since Cylert is a stimulant, it enhances alertness; Dr. Burns wants to see whether it also increases the power to acquire knowledge and, if so, whether such increased power persists.

Not Static. Whether or not Cylert proves useful as a memory rejuvenator, says Dr. Cameron, it may point the way to a fuller and perhaps revolutionary understanding of the basic nature of memory. In the current explosion of research and knowledge, it has become clear that memory is not just a biochemical system, and is more than a mere pattern of behavior.

To Dr. Cameron, the most striking recent finding is that the nerve cell is not, as had been thought, a fixed and static structure, but one that continually forms new connections and breaks up old ones while producing biochemical substances to regulate faraway organs. In the hope of stimulating this neuronal activity, he tried feeding ribonucleic acid (RNA) from yeast to memory-deficient patients in Montreal (TIME, May 18, 1962). After he moved to Albany, he cast around for a better drug and hit upon Cylert, a combination of pemoline (marketed in Europe as a stimulant since 1956) and magnesium hydroxide. The compound apparently stimulates the brain's production of RNA.

Regardless of what the drug's effects on memory may prove to be, says Dr. Cameron, it "opens the way to an almost limitless exploration of new methods of modifying this extraordinary system whereby we can bring forward continually the experiences of the past to modify present actions and future plans." Beyond that, he foresees the possibility of a wholly new system of medicine, based not on conventional drugs and surgery but on the RNA-mediated "memory" inside every one of the body's trillions of cells.

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