The stuff we're made of, and dream of

Like America before Columbus, deoxyribonucleic acid, better known as DNA had been around a long, long time before Francis Crick, James Watson, Maurice Wilkins, and Rosalind Franklin discovered it 50 years ago yesterday (they announced it April 25, 1953, in the journal Nature). Since then, an international team of scientists has used the DNA key to unlock the secrets of the entire human genome. I met Dr. Crick in the mid-80s at a conference at the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California, Irvine, where Dr. James McGaugh has made it his life's work to further our understanding of how we remember what we remember. Dr. McGaugh and I had a nice chat about the hipness of the hippocampus, and the madeleines that brought Marcel Proust's memories alive in A la recherche du temps perdu (in search of lost time), which Proust translated as "Remembrance of Things Past." Having long since deciphered DNA, Dr. Crick was on to more stubborn mysteries by then, trying to understand why we dream, and why we dream what we dream at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. I didn't get to talk to Dr. Crick very long; everybody there wanted to meet him, and though already a senior citizen, and a very married one at that, he was constantly surrounded by beautiful blonde groupies. He told me about his theory about dreams, which was less romantic than Proust's work: Crick believes dreams are just the brain's way of cleaning itself up and getting rid of the day's "cognitive debris." Crick taught me the term "neural net" that day, years before I heard it again on Star Trek: The Next Generation.