POP SCIENCE LESSON 1: Dollhouse

Hey kids! Welcome to Pop Science! Put on your goggles!

OK! Jokes are fun and boobies are fun, but you know what’s really fun? Science! You betchya! So, I must warn you, Pop Science, while still being side-splittingly funny and oddly erotic (like all of my writing), contains a solid nugget of science in the middle. If you’re looking for my normal endearing non-stop joke-machine persona, you’ll still get that tasty nonsense you’re craving, but I’m also going to spit truth and rap about science. Homies.

LESSON 1:

Please open your textbooks to the chapter on Sexualus slavis, common name Dollhouse. Joss Whedon’s most recent and spank-worthy sci-fi TV series is about a corporation that rents out programmable humans to fit your every need. Most people’s needs seem to be exclusively sexual, so the star, a “doll” code-named Echo (played by Eliza Dushku), spends half the show frolicking in her panties. There’s a lot to like about that, as demonstrated below.

Stop trying to distract me; we’re here to talk about science.

The show was originally recommended to me by a full-blown neuroscientist. (She studies clinotaxis in C. elegans, so yeah, she’s legit.) If you know anything about anything, most Sci Fi is infuriating when it tries to sound all “sciency” because the writers use the jargon awkwardly and come out sounding like they translated everything from Chinese using a shoddy online translator. So it’s remarkable when a show manages to find the balance between glossing over the science entirely and embarrassing itself by getting in over its head. Dollhouse, for the most part, found that balance, and that is why neuroscientists recommend it to each other. (Also, they’re a bunch of pervs.)

My friend the legit scientist got me interested in the show by telling me that the show’s neuroscientist (Topher Brink, pictured above) used “Cam Kinase II” correctly in a sentence. Cam Kinase II is kinda where it’s at in terms of memory modification. It’s not exactly cutting edge anymore; it’s more the solid center of the blade. It’s near the realm of science everyone should know if they want to understand how their brain works, so let’s dig in, shall we?

I’m going to have to assume that you know that neurons are brain cells and that they communicate with each other by electrical events called action potentials that release chemicals called neurotransmitters into the space between neurons. The space between neurons is called a synapse, and because synapses are the site of direct neuron-to-neuron communication, changes at the synapse are important for changing the way the brain functions. On the cellular level, a change in the synapse will be able to change the way a neuron fires in response to an incoming stimulus, essentially changing a the neuron’s “memory” for how it should respond. Complex combinations of changes in individual cellular memories are the best explanation we have for how our brain achieves the incredibly difficult task of learning from experience, i.e., memory. Or at least it’s the best explanation in the opinion of a lot of really cool people, myself included.

So what is CaM kinase II? To start with, it’s a protein. You might be savvy enough to know that when something ends in “ase” it means it’s an enzyme. If you’re super-hip, you know that a kinase transfers phosphate groups from itself (a protein) to other proteins, leading to a chain reaction of events within a cell. Because I like metaphors, think of CaM kinase II as the first person on a phone tree. It is capable of calling a number of other people, and some of those people are likely also kinases, so they call other people, and so on. By activating CaM kinase II, a whole lot of shit within a cell can be accomplished quickly.

So back to the synapse. Scientists first got wise to the possible role of CaM kinase II in forming and modifying memories when they noticed that it was localized at synapses. So we have a kinase capable of making massive changes to a cell, located specifically at the site where we think memories are formed. If you’re following along, you can see why scientists started checking this kinase out. (Glossing over years of grueling research)… and viola!, scientists found that by directly activating CaM kinase II in cells, they could mimic the formation of cellular memory (AKA “long term potentiation”). Even cooler, they found that by inhibiting CaM kinase II, they could reverse memories that had already been formed. Are you science-gasming right now? Because I am.

If you could change enough synapses in unison, it would be like a firmware update for your brain. And manipulating CaM kinase II is a reasonable candidate for how one might implement the firmware update. Which is why when Topher just casually and convincingly tossed “CaM kinase II” in a sentence, scientists everywhere got tiny science boners. Dollhouse pulls off the futuristic mind-blowing applications of modern neuroscience research (the kinda shit neuroscientists dream up when they get high) by putting just enough real science behind it to make real scientists get all wet. And the scantily clad dolls. That gets them wet too.

If you too want to be legit, here is some good source material to sink your teeth into:

The CaM kinase II hypothesis for the storage of synaptic memory. (Lisman 1994)

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7530878

Or just google, wiki, or youtube these buzzwords: Long term potentiation, CaM kinase II, activity-dependent plasticity.