In the name of the medical faculty of Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg, I would like to

welcome you all to this special event, on the occasion of the awarding of the Jakob Herz Prize for

medical research of the medical faculty to Professor Fred Rusty Gage.

Professor Gage is the head of the Gage Labs, a genetic laboratory at the well-known Salk Institute for Biological Studies

in La Jolla in Southern California, and he is accompanied by John Adler, Chair for Research on Age-Related Neurodegenerative Diseases

on the Department of Neuroscience at the University of California in San Diego.

Dear Professor Gage, we feel very honored and we are very happy that you have accepted our invitation to receive

the Jakob Herz Prize 2016 from the Erlangen Faculty of Medicine.

We extend our cordial welcome to you and your wife.

Jakob Herz, the awardee of the award today, was an important representative of this community in the second half of the 19th century.

We are of course very happy that you, dear Mr. President Schuster, want to commemorate the 200th birthday of Jakob Herz with us.

What fascinates me is the special feeling that Jakob Herz has for new, future-oriented directions in medicine.

He has tried new operating techniques and developed new narcotic methods and improved the prognosis and the differential diagnosis of tumors.

I remember one of Ralph Waldo Emerson's statements, which he once said,

If you don't try to do something beyond what has already been mastered, you won't grow.

Professor Fred Gage, with his groundbreaking work in the field of adult neurogenesis and in the cell cell technology

has taught us about new insights and a much better understanding of severe brain diseases.

Especially in the face of the increasing number of dementia patients, his research results are more valuable than ever.

The Jakob Herz Prize is awarded for your outstanding, and it was already mentioned, what your major achievements have been, academic and excellent research.

And there is no doubt the professors of the committee for research and young researchers of the Faculty of Medicine and the Faculty Council have once again made the right decision.

And the award is also very special. And not only because Jakob Herz turned 200 on February 2, which is just as old as our university clinic.

And I am very grateful that the Faculty of Medicine also contributes to the reconstruction of the injustice that the National Socialists, under the participation of members of our university,

Professor Jakob Herz, on the Hugenottenplatz on September 15, 1933, have done by destroying his monument.

A few words about the award winner, Jakob Herz. He is one of the 55 people who have been awarded the Ehrnbürgerwürge since 1822.

And if I say that Jakob Herz takes on a very special position in the cultural memory of our city, then I certainly do not underline it.

Rusty Gage was born in 1950 at the East Coast in Portsmouth, a harbor town at the Atlantic Ocean in Virginia.

He graduated from the St. Stephen High School in Rome in 1968, experiencing the strength of both European and American education tradition.

The major rationale for the decision is based on the fact that he is living as scientist by example.

Thank you.

It's a great honor and pleasure to hear from all of you.

I'm humbled to be named as part of this lectureship of this Jakob Herz, who I've learned a lot about over this period of time, and I'm honored and humbled to be named as part of his legacy.

So here comes the test. Now, I want you to study these pictures very carefully, submit them to your hippocampus, and then at a later time point, I'm going to present these figures to you in conjunction with another figure.

And all you have to do is to determine which one you've seen before of the two that I'm going to present.

So most of you, you can nod if you think you understand, you figure, you think you know where it is.

Do we get a lot of recognition out there? You can even raise your hand if you think you know which one it is.

How about this one? Okay, now you've got it. Okay, so maybe this one.

Okay, now I just want to tell you, your dentate gyrus is firing up at this point. So this is the situation. These are the cases when objects are closely related to each other.

In those other cases, you didn't need your dentate gyrus. You didn't need any new objects. You could have solved this on other ways.

But in situations where you are having to draw up the memory that you had before and make that comparison, that's where it's important.