Where is my past? |
| When I recently cleared up my desk (the old give way to the new...), I made several perplexing discoveries. The last time when I had to do this in 1999, I crammed all my things into cases and didn't have a closer look at them. Most of them remained there since then. But this time I went through all my documents, piece by piece. And I even resurrected the old stuff from the cases having been sealed for more than a decade. This time I confronted the past and decided: to throw or to keep? |
| And I threw a lot. I guess, it will not be my loss. On the contrary, I gained some interesting insights. My first achievement as a post doc in Gif-sur-Yvette (CNRS) was the visualization of kainic acid binding site subtypes (Berger & Ben-Ari 1983). I remember these experiments very well. I even know that I spent the summer holidays with my wife and children on the island Oléron, whilst the brain slices labelled with [3H]kainic acid were exposed to the films in the cassettes. |
| But when I went through my lab notes of these days, I found reference to experiments done in parallel with the muscarinic radioligand [3H]QNB. To the best of my efforts, I was unable to recollect the slightest memory trace of this part of our project. If I believe in my notes, also this part gave satifying results, but apparently they were without any interest to us and served just as some kind of positive control ([3H]QNB was at the time one of the best established radioligands). |
| During these early times, I was a regular participant in various larger congresses and smaller meetings. Some of them remain unforgettable adventures, but do they? In an essay some time ago I claimed to "remember a meeting near Bologna in the 1980ies". When I went through the proceedings of all these events, deciding which to keep and which to get rid of, I was aware of this mention and expected to hit on something pertinent. I didn't. Finally I found out that this meeting had been near Padua in 1990. I was happy to correct my essay: the speaker mentioned apologized for having not seen this seminal paper in Nature not just a few months, but nearly 5 years ago... |
| But what about my other memories? Would it be possible to make further corrections? Maybe, if I would go through my records even more carefully. But do I have records of everything? Surely not. While thinking about these discoveries in personal history, I became aware of a mysterious narrative, that seems to be inscribed into my mind ever since. For some unknown reason, it appears to me as if everything I did in my life was inscribed into some kind of eternal book, and that in this book you and me and everyone might read someday, how it really was. |
| While throwing away about 50% of my personal records, I begin to doubt that such a book really exists. |
| 2/12 < MB 2/12 > 3/12 Hardships of scientific research |
| M
Berger & Y Ben-Ari (1983) Autoradiographic visualization of
[3H]kainic acid receptor subtypes in the rat hippocampus. Neurosci Lett
39:237-42 Excitatory Amino Acids 1990. Montegrotto Terme, Padova, Italy, Mai 21-26, 1990. Neurochem Int 16 S1. |