Medicine and botany were once so intimately linked that in the 16th century the great medical schools at Padua and Bologna in Italy were renowned for the botanic gardens in which they grew their medicinal plants. Though chemically synthesised drugs have weakened that link, plants still inspire new medicines, including some that enhance memory.
In her project 鈥淪eeds of memory鈥�, Karen Ingham highlights this cross-fertilisation of neuroscience, botany and pharmacology. Alzheimer鈥檚 Daffodils (reproduced above) is made up of a photograph of the plants pushing up through snow superimposed on an image of the hippocampus. This region of the brain is thought to play a critical role in the formation of new memories, and is one of the first to be damaged by Alzheimer鈥檚 disease.
For this project, Ingham collaborated with Tim Gould of the neuroscience research group at Cardiff University in the UK, who provided the highly magnified image of the hippocampus: it shows a slice of rat brain in which neurons are stained blue, and the non-neuronal support cells known as glia are red, yellow and green.
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Alzheimer鈥檚 Daffodils is an allegory for galantamine, a drug derived from snowdrops and daffodils that is widely used to treat Alzheimer鈥檚 disease. It is also an analogy for the way the brain lays down memories. Once they have been formed in the hippocampus, one theory holds, memories are transferred for long-term storage to other parts of the brain such as the cortex. When these memories are recalled, the hippocampus seems to become involved again.
鈥淚 wanted to draw the analogy with a bulb which survives winter in a quiescent state and is then reactivated in spring,鈥� says Ingham. Her book Seeds of Memory: Art, neuroscience and botany, is published by the Centre For Lens-Based Arts at Swansea Institute (CLASI), Swansea, UK.