It’s remarkable that, more than 60 years later, Sacktor remembers this fleeting childhood moment at all. The astonishing nature of memory is that every recollection is a physical trace, imprinted into brain tissue by the molecular machinery of neurons. In 2024, working alongside a team that included his longtime collaborator André Fenton, a neuroscientist at New York University, Sacktor offered a potential explanation in a paper published in Science Advances. In 1984, Francis Crick described a biological conundrum: Memories last years, while most molecules degrade in days or weeks. The findings offer a compelling response to Crick’s dilemma, reconciling the discordant timescales to explain how ephemeral molecules maintain memories that last a lifetime.