To read Rachel Clarke’s The Story of a Heart, which has won this year’s Women’s prize for nonfiction, is to experience an onslaught of often competing emotions. There is awed disbelief at the sheer skill and dedication of the medical teams who transplanted the heart of nine-year-old Keira, who had been killed in a head-on traffic collision, into the body of Max, a little boy facing almost certain death from rapidly deteriorating dilated cardiomyopathy. There is vast admiration for the inexhaustible compassion of the teams who cared for both children and their families, and wonder at the cascade of medical advances, each breakthrough representing determination, inspiration, rigorous work, and careful navigation of newly emerging ethical territory. And most flooring of all is the immense courage of two families, one devastated by the sudden loss of a precious child, the other faced with a diagnosis that threatened to tear their lives apart.

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To write such a story requires special preparation. “I was full of trepidation when I first approached Keira’s family,” Clarke tells me the morning after she was awarded the prize. “I knew that I was asking them to entrust me with the most precious thing, their beloved daughter Keira’s story, her memory.” The former journalist trained as a doctor in her late 20s, and has spent most of her medical career working in palliative care. Subsequently, she has also become an acclaimed writer and committed campaigner, publishing three memoirs: Your Life in My Hands, Dear Life and Breathtaking. She turned to her medical training for guidance when writing The Story of a Heart. “I said to myself, my framework will be my medical framework, so I would conduct myself in such a way that they would, I hoped, trust me in the same way that someone might trust me as a doctor. And if at any point they changed their mind, then they could walk away from the project.”

Each family read the manuscript in its entirety, with Clarke determined that she would not publish if they had any qualms. On the morning that we speak, she has been in touch with them, and she reads me a message from Loanna, Keira’s mother. It says simply: “Keira really has made such a difference to so many people. She is just incredible.” Loanna, she goes on to tell me, now visits schools to tell children about Keira; Max’s mother, Emma, is an “indefatigable” ambassador for the NHS’s organ donation programme. Nobody who reads the book could forget the almost superhuman fortitude of Keira’s father, Joe, or her sisters, all of whom not only consented but pressed forward with donating her organs, even as Loanna and Keira’s brother were gravely injured. There, too, is the bravery of Max’s father, Paul, supporting his desperately ill son through the pain and trauma of treatment; and Max’s brother, Harry, now finishing his second year at medical school. It is because of these people that in 2020, Max and Keira’s Law entered the statute books, ruling that adults would be presumed to have given consent to organ donation, rather than having to opt in, an enormously important step in addressing the scarcity of donor organs.

For Clarke, it was also important to shine a light on the care with which the medical teams treat those who, in death, are giving someone else the chance of life; from the “moment of honour” that precedes all surgery to retrieve donor organs, in which all fall silent to consider the patient, to the last offices of washing and dressing performed by nurses. “It’s the patient that’s the important person,” she explains. “And I think that says something very profound about us as a species, doesn’t it?”

Clarke, who is the mother of two teenagers, spends half her time working with patients, and half on “other things”; not only writing books, but shining a light on the challenges her profession – and by extension all of us – are facing. At the moment, she is furious about the government’s recent decision to stop issuing visas to foreign care workers, because what they do is regarded as unskilled labour. With a shortage of 100,000 care workers, the result is patients unable to be discharged from hospital: “A direct consequence of that is I will see more patients on trolleys dying outside an A&E that they can’t even get into because we don’t have enough care workers. I will look them in the eye. Keir Starmer won’t. Wes Streeting won’t. But I will, and I will try to give them the best care I can in a corridor where there isn’t even a curtain to draw around them for dignity.”

She has, she says, always been torn between the arts and science, but that medicine is “the perfect marriage of hard science and beautiful, messy humanity. And I try to write books that represent medicine accurately in that sense. You are not a good doctor if you’re just a scientist and you’re not a good doctor if you’re just about emotion and feeling: you have to marry the two.”

Helena Bonham Carter, Toby Jones and Asa Butterfield are among actors performing poems in memory of family members and friends who have died, to mark Celebration Day later this month.

The initiative, conceived in 2022 by high-profile figures including Stephen Fry, Prue Leith, film director Oliver Parker and writer and poetry curator Allie Esiri, sets aside a day in the calendar each year to celebrate the lives of lost loved ones, inspired by celebrations such as Mexico’s Day of the Dead. The first Celebration Day was held on 26 June 2022, and now it runs on the last bank holiday Monday in May, which this year will be 26 May.

Stephen Mangan, Nathaniel Parker and Susan Wokoma were also filmed reading poems at Abbey Road studios in London. The videos will be published exclusively on the Guardian website in the lead up to Celebration Day, with the first, which features Bonham Carter reading Don’t Let That Horse by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, available to watch today.

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Wilfred Owen and Sheenagh Pugh are among the poets whose works were selected by the actors. Jones, known for his roles in Mr Bates vs the Post Office and Detectorists, picked Portrait of a Romantic by ASJ Tessimond, in memory of his father, who died a year after Jones introduced him to the poem.

Poems “were like clothing” to his father, said Jones – he “wanted to live inside” them, and memorised a number of them, including Portrait of a Romantic. “We decided to use the second stanza of this poem on his gravestone”, said Jones. “When I read the poem, inevitably I reflect on my Dad, and the huge influence he’s had on both what I do, and how I feel about what I do.”

Bonham Carter chose Don’t Let That Horse in memory of her grandmother, who was known as “Bubbles”. A painter who made “sort of fake Chagalls”, Bonham Carter described her grandmother as an “eternal child” who “always had a sense of play”.

“She died at 89, but frankly she never really grew older emotionally than about seven. A good reminder that no matter how serious it gets, you’ve got to remember to have fun.”

Lost loved ones “remain part of our fabric, our internal world”, the actor added. “We need permission to stop – a day in which we can invoke them and remember them, and let them live again through us.” After losing somebody, “you might lose what you were when you were with them. And that relationship needs to carry on, somehow”.

The actors worked with Esiri, who compiled 365 Poems for Life and A Poem for Every Day of the Year, to choose their poems. Most of us reach for poetry at significant moments in life, like weddings and funerals, because poems “help us express things that most of us find really difficult to express”, said Esiri.

The language of poetry “gives you a path when you’re suffering eviscerating feelings of grief and you’ve lost your hold on the earth and everything’s very very fractured”, she added. The “great poet gives you words, and it’s sort of like holding your hand across time”.

Star pin badges will be on sale at WH Smith stores in the run-up to the 26 May celebration, with proceeds going to charities Mind, the Royal Marsden Cancer Charity, Make-A-Wish and Hospice UK. The public are encouraged to share memories of loved ones on social media using the hashtag #ShareYourStar.

Parker, who directed the videos, said the project “was a genuinely memorable experience”.

“Sometimes with a light touch, sometimes deeply moving, they are small, intimate acts of sharing, whether defiant, mournful or inspiring,” he said.

NIH-funded study uses cutting-edge imaging techniques to reconstruct features underlying learning and memory in the mouse brain

March 20, 2025
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What:

In a study supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), researchers revealed the structural underpinnings of memory formation across a broad network of neurons in the mouse brain. This work sheds light on the fundamentally flexible nature of how memories are made, detailing learning-related changes at the cellular and subcellular levels with unprecedented resolution. Understanding this flexibility may help explain why memory and learning processes sometimes go awry.

The findings, published in Science, showed that neurons assigned to a memory trace reorganized their connections to other neurons through an atypical type of connection called a multi-synaptic bouton. In a multi-synaptic bouton, the axon of the neuron relaying the signal with information contacts multiple neurons that receive the signal. According to the researchers, multi-synaptic boutons may enable the cellular flexibility of information coding observed in previous research.

The researchers also found that neurons involved in memory formation were not preferentially connected with each other. This finding challenges the idea that “neurons that fire together wire together,” as would be predicted by a traditional theory of learning.

In addition, the researchers observed that neurons allocated to a memory trace reorganized certain intracellular structures that provide energy and support communication and plasticity in neuronal connections. These neurons also had enhanced interactions with support cells known as astrocytes.

Using a combination of advanced genetic tools, 3D electron microscopy, and artificial intelligence, Scripps Research scientists Marco Uytiepo, Anton Maximov, Ph.D., and colleagues reconstructed a wiring diagram of neurons involved in learning and identified structural changes to these neurons and their connections at the cellular and subcellular levels.

To examine structural features associated with learning, the researchers exposed mice to a conditioning task and examined the hippocampus region of the brain about 1 week later. They selected this time point because it occurs after memories are first encoded but before they are reorganized for long-term storage. Using advanced genetic techniques, the researchers permanently labeled subsets of hippocampal neurons activated during learning, which enabled reliable identification. They then used 3D electron microscopy and artificial intelligence algorithms to produce nanoscale reconstructions of the excitatory neural networks involved in learning.

This study provides a comprehensive view of the structural hallmarks of memory formation in one brain region. It also raises new questions for further exploration. Future studies will be crucial in determining whether similar mechanisms operate across different time points and neural circuits. In addition, further investigation into the molecular composition of multi-synaptic boutons is needed to determine their precise role in memory and other cognitive processes.

The research was supported by funding from the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, and NIH’s Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies® Initiative, or The BRAIN Initiative®.

Who:

Jamie Driscoll, National Institute of Mental Health

Dr. Eunyoung Kim, National Institute of Mental Health

Study:

Uytiepo, M., Zhu, Y., Bushong, E., Chou, K., Polli, F. S., Zhao, E., Kim, K.-Y., Luu, D., Chang, L., Yang, D., Ma, T. C., Kim, M., Zhang, Y., Walton, G., Quach, T., Haber, M., Patapoutian, L., Shahbazi, A., Zhang, Y., …  Maximov, A. (2025). Synaptic architecture of a memory engram in the mouse hippocampus. Science. http://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ado8316 

NIH funding:

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The Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies® and The BRAIN Initiative® are registered trademarks of HHS.

About the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH): The mission of the NIMH is to transform the understanding and treatment of mental illnesses through basic and clinical research, paving the way for prevention, recovery and cure. For more information, visit the NIMH website.

About the National Institutes of Health (NIH): NIH, the nation’s medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIHand its programs, visit the NIH website .

NIH…Turning Discovery Into Health®