Alcino J. Silva (born April 9, 1961) is a Portuguese-American neuroscientist who was the recipient of the 2008 Order of Prince Henry and elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2013 for his contributions to the molecular cellular cognition of memory, a field he pioneered with the publication of two articles in Science in 1992.
Silva is a Distinguished Professor of neurobiology, psychiatry and psychology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, director of the Integrated Center for Learning and Memory at UCLA, and the Founding President of the Molecular and Cellular Cognition Society.
He is former scientific director of the Division of Intramural Research Programs at the National Institute of Mental Health, having also served as member of the Board of Regents of the University of Minho, Portugal.
Early years
Silva was born in Portugal in 1961, but spent his early years in Luanda, Angola. He left Africa when he was 12 and in Portugal he went through the Carnation Revolution of 1974. He arrived in the United States in 1978, attended Rutgers University, where he studied biology and philosophy and worked in the Drosophila laboratory of William Sofer. After that he pursued graduate studies in human genetics at the University of Utah. There, he worked with Raymond White, one of the pioneers of modern human genetics.
His graduate work showed that epigenetic patterns of DNA methylation can be polymorphic and that they are inherited in a Mendelian fashion. During his graduate studies he became intrigued by the inner processes of science, and organized yearly graduate symposia where leading scientists shared their insights on this subject. It was in Utah that he realized that he could combine his passion for biology with his interest in epistemology. It was also in Utah, while working with Mario Capecchi, that he had the idea of bringing the newly developed mouse gene targeting approaches to studies of memory. Capecchi shared the Nobel prize with Martin Evans and Oliver Smithies for the development of gene targeting strategies in mice.
Post-doctoral work and early research at MIT
While at a meeting in Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Silva heard from Peter Mombaerts (now at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysics) that Susumu Tonegawa at MIT was interested in Neuroscience (Tonegawa had taken a Neuroscience course at CSHL in 1987), and that his lab was trying to set up gene targeting to study the immunology T-cell receptors they had cloned. So, he wrote to Tonegawa and proposed to target genes expressed postnatally in the cerebellum to study cerebellar memory. At the time the Tonegawa laboratory at MIT was focused exclusively in immunology. Susumu Tomegawa was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1987 for his discovery of the genetic mechanism that produces antibody diversity. Silva joined the Tonegawa laboratory in early fall of 1988.
After attending a Society for Neuroscience symposium (Toronto, 1988), organized by John Lisman on mechanisms of hippocampal plasticity, Silva decided to study hippocampal-dependent memory formation. The compelling properties of calcium calmodulin kinase II, one of the topics discussed in that symposium, and a model by John Lisman proposing a key role for that kinase in hippocampal learning and memory, persuaded Silva to refocus his project in the Tonegawa laboratory on the role of the alpha calcium calmodulin kinase II in hippocampal synaptic plasticity and learning & memory. The two articles he published in Science as a post-doctural fellow in Susumu Tonegawa's laboratory were the first to combine molecular genetic techniques with electrophysiological analyses and behavioral studies. This interdisciplinary integration of molecular, electrophysiological and behavioral approaches, fostered by transgenic techniques, has become a mainstay of neuroscience studies.