05.2020 | THE SCIENTIST 15Notebook
NEWS AND ANALYSIS© ISTOCK.COM, JACUS
A Memory
of Trauma
N
ovember 13, 2015, will be remem-
bered in France and around the
world as the day that Paris fell
under attack by a group of terrorists. More
than 130 people died. Many others sur-
vived to carry on lives in the wake of this
categorically traumatic experience. “When
you listen to the reports... of the survi-
vors, it was shocking,” says Karen Ersche,
a neuroscientist at the University of Cam-
bridge. “It was gruesome. It was worse
than a horror film.”
The head of the French National Cen-
tre for Scientific Research (CNRS) at the
time, Alain Fuchs, wrote a letter imploringresearchers to respond to the attacks with
science. After reading the letter, cognitive
neuroscientist Pierre Gagnepain felt moved
to do something. Although he didn’t study
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD),
his work was “extremely connected to
the question of how the brain [controls]
unwanted memory experience,” says Gag-
nepain, a researcher in Francis Eustache’s
lab in the Neuropsychology and Imaging of
Human Memory department at the French
National Institute of Health and Medical
Research (INSERM). “I wanted to focus...
on what could protect and increase resil-
ience” in people who suffered a trauma.
In January 2016, Eustache and
CNRS research director Denis Peschan-
ski met with Fuchs to discuss launching
a national program to study the survivorsof the November 13 attacks. Gagnepain
soon joined in the conversations, as did
Yves Lévy, head of INSERM at the time,
and the 13-Novembre Programme was
born. Researchers involved in the project,
which is ongoing, aim to film testimonies
from 1,000 volunteers—including those
who survived the attacks, people from
targeted neighborhoods, and inhabitants
of surrounding areas and other cities—
about their experiences that night. They
have also begun using fMRI to look at the
brains of some of those participants.
One question the researchers want
to explore through the lens of theM AY 2020IN MEMORY: People in Paris placed flowers to
commemorate victims of the terror attacks in
November 2015.