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AN AUDIENCE FOR EINSTEIN
the Award Winning Novel by Mark Wakely

The idea for An Audience for Einstein first occurred to me several years ago. While there have been plenty of stories about memory transfer in science fiction almost from its inception, rather than focus on how such a transfer could be achieved, I knew I wanted to focus instead on the human drama and ethical dilemmas of such an experiment.

Besides, we still don't know how memory works exactly, so any "explanation" remains well within the realm of science fiction.

That said, the novel had to at least present a working hypothesis of memory transfer- however speculative- to be credible. I turned to the intriguing theory that memories are created as complex structures of cellular proteins called "Hebbosomes" after psychologist Donald Hebb, who first theorized that links between nerve cells in the brain (the synapses) are responsible for memories being "set." This raises the enticing possibility that those proteins- if removed intact and still viable- could be transferred to a suitable recipient and continue to function. Presumably, the recipient would have to be someone whose brain is still actively developing to readily allow all of the donor Hebbosomes to take up residence, so to speak. In other words, someone young. It was this idea of transferable memory proteins that made An Audience for Einstein possible.

For a more detailed article about memory creation, go to:

http://www.chemsoc.org/chembytes/ezine/2002/gross_dec02.htm

The trigger for all these new memories is a specific smell familiar to Professor Percival Marlowe, and here we are on firmer scientific ground. Even before Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust, it was generally accepted knowledge that specific smells could bring forth a veritable flood of childhood memories.
Coincidentally, last year's Nobel Prize for Medicine went to Professors Richard Axel and Linda Buck, for their research into how smells create memories. You can read more about their discoveries here:

http://nobelprize.org/medicine/laureates/2004/illpres/index.html

And finally, for further information about the smell/memory connection, go to the following:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/mind/articles/intelligenceandmemory/nostalgicsmells.shtml

http://www.apa.org/monitor/jan98/smell.html