Relax, it's worse than you think. Much worse.

As this piece in the Guardian notes:

The Greenland ice cap is melting so quickly that it is triggering earthquakes as pieces of ice several cubic kilometres in size break off.

Yes, this is the land-based Greenland icecap, which contains enough water to raise sea levels worldwide by over 20 feet.

Robert Correll, the chairman of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, states, "We have seen a massive acceleration of the speed with which these glaciers are moving into the sea. The ice is moving at two metres an hour on a front 5km [3 miles] long and 1,500 metres deep."

But again, it's worse than you think.

Professor Correll also commented that he had, "seen gigantic holes in it through which swirling masses of melt water were falling. I first looked at this glacier in the 1960s and there were no holes. These so-called moulins, 10 to 15 metres across, have opened up all over the place. There are hundreds of them."

The article continues:

He said ice-penetrating radar showed that this melt water was pouring through to the bottom of the glacier creating a lake 500 metres deep which was causing the glacier "to float on land. These melt-water rivers are lubricating the glacier, like applying oil to a surface and causing it to slide into the sea. It is causing a massive acceleration which could be catastrophic."

But again, it's worse than you think.

The glacier is now moving at 15km a year into the sea although in surges it moves even faster. He measured one surge at 5km in 90 minutes - an extraordinary event.

On a more positive note, the magnitude 1 to 3 earthquakes created by shifting glaciers are apparently nothing to be alarmed about in and of themselves, but merely indicative of the scale of the changes taking place in the icecap itself.

Everyone who might be reading this: Yes, I do still think it's critical to reduce carbon emissions. But given the titanic range and speed of these changes, we all need to be looking at the strong possibility that our coastlines could be inundated in less than a decade. In fact, scientists can not determine which direction the climate will go in this kind of a collapse -- one serious option is the destruction of the North Atlantic Current, putting Europe into an ice age and seriously chilling the rest of the Northern Hemisphere in particular. If that does not happen, or if it is a relatively minor ice age, it's still possible that we will have to deal with a runaway global warming process -- an outgassing of the oceans' methane could be unbelievably catastrophic. (That is to say, worse than a collapse of human civilization.)

Given that we are apt to see existing lines of transportation come apart on a relatively short time scale if the Greenland ice sheet continues to crumble at this accelerating pace, I would suggest combining your carbon reduction and personal survival goals by, among other things, seeking alternative energy sources for your present and possible future emergency needs. I would also suggest encouraging the same thing in your community and among your family and friends.

Wherever you are, you and your community need energy, food and water to survive, not to mention shelter, medicine, spare parts and some kind of a sustainable economy. You should think about what you and those around you will need in these areas, and about other, longer-term requirements, such as medical care, education, etc.

I will be posting some more extensive planning options relating to disaster survival for crises on the scale of one's nation or civilization, but I encourage everyone to make their own best plans now, as well as doing whatever they can to prevent or contain the cataclysmic threats we may soon be facing.

Future Imperative

A group of researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health has announced that industrial chemicals have impaired the brain development of children, creating behaviorial problems and reducing intelligence and attention span. This article in Montreal's Gazette discusses the report at greater length. The piece adds:

The Lancet report says one in six children now has a developmental disability, many of them learning problems, sensory deficits and developmental delays that affect the nervous system. Mounting evidence has linked industrial chemicals to such neurological disorders, and the report deplores the way the chemicals are ''not regulated to protect children.''

There are ''great gaps'' in testing of the chemicals, and regulators will only restrict compounds if there is a ''high level'' of proof of damage and problems, the report says, adding this puts vulnerable developing brains at unacceptable risk.

In nine months, the fetal brain grows into ''a complex organ consisting of billions of precisely located, highly interconnected and specialized cells,'' the report says.

The growth occurs within ''a tightly controlled time frame, in which each developmental stage has to be reached on schedule and in the correct sequence.''

This creates ''windows of unique susceptibility to toxic interference'' that can have permanent consequences, say Grandjean and co-author Philip J. Landrigan, a professor at Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

Their list of 201 chemicals toxic to the human brain is based on available data and studies, and they say there are likely many more.

Grim though these statistics are, they do offer a peculiar brand of hope. Nations have the option of greatly increasing their overall intelligence by solving the many unnecessary afflictions facing their children -- such as these toxins, malnutrition, or inferior educational opportunities -- thus making (relatively) great strides forward.

Further, as countries begin to confront the reality of how badly they have stunted so many of their children both developmentally and in terms of their ultimate biological potential, we may see governments, communities and NGOs start to take options for counteracting these deficits much more seriously, whether in the form of accelerated learning, nootropic nutrients, nootropic drugs (perhaps first distributed for strictly therapeutic reasons) and so forth.

Could mistakes be made in an abrupt, large-scale imposition of such technologies? Of course. But the nature of this problem means that many solutions will probably be either implemented very slowly and carefully with considerable empirical data (therapeutic drugs) or piecemeal, in a voluntary way (such as small Montessory schools, self-hypnosis experiments or the use of sensory deprivation tanks).

We should also remember, this data follows on recent U.S. military reports that 31% of U.S. Marines, 38% of U.S. soldiers and 49% of national guardsmen suffer from conditions such as Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Which means that eventually, the U.S. is also going to have to deal with the brain damage and/or mental illnesses of hundreds of thousands of its troops. All of which means that methods for improving the brain, whether termed "enhancements" or "therapy," are going to be of growing concern to the U.S., especially as soon as any of these organizations calculate the cost of taking care of someone with significant brain damage, versus not having to take care of a once-more productive citizen.

 The virtual community of Second Life has attracted many businesses, commentators, real estate brokers, trend watchers, journalists and, well, odd people. Not to mention writers, artists, innovators, scientists and other creative and visionary types. Many Second Life boosters can no doubt defend the communities peculiarities or at least wax rhapsodic about "Second Life at its best." Tech boosters are good at obscuring reality with a glorious vision of the hypothetical, utopian future.

 

Ironically, it's that Platonic ideal of Second Life, that glorious utopia-to-be, that is the threat I wish to address today.  

 

A thought occurred to me when Anders Sandberg gave a lecture, "Keep on Raging Against Aging," on Second Life. The idea of an array of people actively engaged in creating the future (or at least enthusiastic spectators to the future rising before their eyes) assembling in virtual bodies to hear a talk on the radical near-future was intriguing, to say the least. Ironically, that lecture looked almost like the kind of ultimate Internet discussed in the heady days of the late 90s, a place where you could discuss radical, world-changing ideas with mavericks from across the globe. 

 

And for transhumanist enthusiasts, paradise, at least in that hour, was clearly already here. Naturally participants in a VR world like Second Life are a self-selected group, and are more apt to be interested in certain things like, well, VR, online networks, the online world, the uploading of human consciousness, etc. What could be better for someone looking to discuss these concepts in depth?

 

But therein lays my concern: I wonder to what degree the "irrational exuberance" of the Dot.Com era was fed by a relatively small group of hard-core enthusiasts talking mainly to each other and their admiring fans. If you consider how much the residents of places like Silicon Valley were talking to themselves, the members of other tech enclaves, those first-adopters initially entering the Internet and Web, and businessmen, writers and politicians eager to tap into the Next Big Thing the Net was becoming... If you consider these factors, you can see how the real-world and online communities helped to seal themselves off from disquieting criticism, while appearing to be completely open to outside ideas.

 

My point? I wonder to what degree the discipline of future studies and many business forecasting efforts are warped by the fact that technology experts tend to be online and highly wired, and part of virtual communities that still overselect for, say, computer programmers and tech workers. Whatever virtues the U.S. Army's latest future combat system concept may have had, one wonders if there would have been such an emphasis on connectivity and wiring the "common grunt" into the military's digital communications networks if that research hadn't come out of a period in which greater connectivity was seen as the solution to almost everything.

 

Meanwhile, science-fiction visions of the future seem dominated by a specific breed of technology popular among online SF fans -- AI, nanotech assemblers, cybernetics and/or human uploading. That's not entirely surprising, if you ask fans who are programmers if they believe AI is possible, you're much more likely to get an affirmative than if you ask the Man on the Street. It's not surprising that the philosophers pushing the idea of a computer-driven "Singularity" have heavy backgrounds in computer hardware or software development. (Singularity -- a point when technological change is happening too rapidly for ordinary human minds to be able to remotely guess what might happen next; usually brought on by the rise of higher intelligence, whether biological or artificial.)

 

Futurists talking online about "human enhancement" and other forms of radical evolution seem to be much more taken with the idea of using cybernetic implants or uploading to enhance human intelligence -- rather than, say, genetic enhancement or nootropic drugs. Much less the use of accelerated learning, self-hypnosis or other exercises or disciplines. Is that a purely rational assessment, or the result of having relatively limited sources of information on the subject of human evolution?

 

Returning to the rise of VR worlds, is it possible that a "reality" which increasingly draws in so many of our writers, leaders, visionaries and commentators is going to have a wildly disproportionate impact on the world's thinking? On the one hand, you may end up a lot of the world's brilliant and innovative minds hanging out together and working together. On the other, you may end up in an intellectual hothouse where the inhabitants aren't just sharing much the same limited viewpoint on the world, but in which the issues of their particular, heavily represented sliver of civilization loom large over everything else in the greater society.

 

For example, how many people remember the aggressively ultra-Libertarian philosophy that emerged in the tech industry during the 90s boom? You would forever be hearing some programmer who'd just gotten his first stock options ranting about how the government was obsolete (even for some age-old tasks as law enforcement, military defense, and road construction) and how the Market, and, of course, the Net, were going to sweep everything else aside and transform the world into a hyper-capitalist utopia.

 

And regardless of how much of a Libertarian, Socialist, moderate, anarchist, etc you might be, it was always interesting to see how little many ideological champions seemed to know about how the world actually works, and what kinds of sincere objections people might have to their agendas. So issues like making stock options tax free and as easy to hand out as possible seemed much more important than trivial concerns like taxing some of that money sloshing around for other societal needs (like maintaining that Internet thing) or preventing tax fraud or insuring more tech startups were actually viable. How could any of those things be important?

 

Which raises a concern about having large numbers of very intelligent people spending vast amounts of time residing in worlds in some ways more appealing than the real one. What happens if these people become even more detached from reality than those Dot.Boom programmer/revolutionaries looking at the world from a corner office in Silicon Valley through the filter of Cliffnotes' Ayn Rand? And what happens if a more subtle bias comes into existance in which everything not acknowledged and accepted by the core "society" becomes a fringe concern, if not irrelevant?

Yes, a generation of mad scientists are standing over their field (of electroshock brain enhancement) shouting "It's alive! It's alive!" Why?

To begin with, this article from Reuters describes an experiment in which mild electrical flows were used to stimulate the brains of sleeping subjects, resulting in enhanced memory.

When they applied several currents that mimic natural slow oscillating brain waves in sleep they enhanced the memory of medical students who had done a word-learning task.

"It leads to improved memory retention," said Jan Born, a neuroscientist at the University of Luebeck.

This method could help people with memory problems as well as senile dementia caused Alzheimer's and other diseases.

If the currents were applied to the scalp during deep sleep, the first few hours of nocturnal sleep, the students recalled a greater number of words than if they had been given a sham brain stimulation.

"This is proof that this slow oscillation has a real function during sleep -- to build and consolidate memory," said Born.

"It is an eight percent increase overall. This is a striking increase," he added.

The article also notes that the medical students in question already had very good memory skills, so this effect isn't simply the result of repairing weaknesses in an underperforming brain. We're seeing an improvement of almost 1/12 over a typical subject's normal recall. That's fairly significant for such a simple technique.

And we might ask ourselves, once this method is improved and the technology refined, would unobtrusive electrodes be able to pass microcurrents through our heads whenever we need enhanced memory during the day? Also, some readers may recall this Wired article on the discovery that passing tiny electrical currents through the front of someone's head can boost verbal skills by as much as 20%.

Perhaps the best question to ask is: How many such intellect-enhancing "shortcuts" are out there? How frequently can they be (safely) applied to our brains? Could an unobtrusive electrical stimulation device simultaneously enhance our abilities in several different domains -- not just memory and verbal skills, but mathematical ability, visualization, creative talents, learning new skills, etc?

We should remember the intriguing research in cranial electro-stimulation and transcranial magnetic stimulation, technologies which seem to enhance creativity and/or intelligence. Some of these devices are already available to the public as affordable electronic tools. So this evolution and democratization of these technologies is already underway.

Consider: A near-perpetual, harmless and effortless means of improving human abilities could have a profound impact on the general population, especially given that many high-performing people, statistically speaking, are only small step above the average person on many tests of basic skills. People with the equivalent of a 140 I.Q. can generally work as scientists or doctors, or in low-skilled manual labor, or anywhere in between; it's their choice. People with an effective 70 I.Q. are basically stuck with the low-skilled labor jobs; there's nothing else they can master with a reasonable expenditure of effort.

This kind of technology might not make us all geniuses, but it could put whole new careers and life-opportunities within reach of millions if not billions of human beings. And that alone makes it worthy of further attention.

Future Imperative

The New York Times reports on how space probes are being designed with increasing levels of mental autonomy. The Times notes:

Until recently, interplanetary robotic explorers have largely been marionettes of mission controllers back on Earth. The controllers sent instructions, and the spacecraft diligently executed them.

But as missions go farther and become more ambitious, long-distance puppetry becomes less and less practical. If dumb spacecraft will not work, the answer is to make them smarter. Artificial intelligence will increasingly give spacecraft the ability to think for themselves.

"These technologies are already in operation on specific missions," said Steve Chien, a computer scientist who heads the artificial intelligence group at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Scientists discussed some of the recent progress last week at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Baltimore.

Clearly, this is yet another demand on computational flexibility and resources apt to drive us towards more advanced AI technology. But we may still be looking at a near future in which our artificial intelligence needs are being met by piecemeal advances which more-than-adequately meet our practical needs, while failing to create the kind of transcendant AI (or rapidly evolving seed AI) many researchers and enthusiasts are looking for.

But it remains an interesting field to track. Especially when that track leads into deep space.

Future Imperative

This BBC radio broadcast discusses how humans could be made "superhuman" in order to optimize them for space travel.

Scientists are already working on new ways to keep humans alive for long periods, far from the Earth. Sue Nelson explores how in order to travel in space we will need to become human aliens.

This is an interesting piece, though it focuses more on the practical problems of sending unaugmented humans into space for long periods (a Mars mission, etc). It's interesting that there's not much discussion as to whether human augmentation is both possible and, even in the near-term, practical.

This segment is also a good reminder that there are many ways in which human beings might be optimized, including many potent augmentations that have nothing to do with enhancing human intelligence in any way. Realistically, we could easily end up with a great diversity of new human abilities as people are augmented for scientific research, athletic accomplishment, artistic creativity, deep-space exploration, combat missions and/or technological innovation.

This diversity is intriguing given that three of the most prominent subjects of human augmentation research are military personnel, athletes and astronauts.

I would argue that a degree of physical enhancement -- or at least, certain kinds of physical enhancement -- can clearly support the function of the biological brain. There is plenty of research, for example, indicating the benefits of cardio-vascular exercise on the brain. But even without these indirect intellectual benefits, the practical value of physical enhancements means we can anticipate a tremendous diversity in augmented humans -- barring some homogenizing force, such as a single, mandated set of biotech/cybernetic enhancements, or conversely, strict restrictions on what modifications people will be allowed to make use of.

But an intriguing prospect, either way.

Bio, Soc
Future Imperative

The Washington Post reports on some of the latest military-driven human augmentation research:

In their quest to create the superwarrior of the future, some military researchers aren't focusing on the obvious body parts such as legs or biceps or hearts. They're looking at tongues.

By routing signals from helmet-mounted cameras, sonar and other equipment through the tongue to the brain, they hope to give elite troops superhuman senses similar to those of owls, snakes and fish.

Researchers at Florida's Institute for Human and Machine Cognition envision their work giving Army Rangers 360-degree unobstructed vision at night and allowing Navy SEALs to sense sonar in their heads while maintaining normal vision underwater -- turning science fiction into reality.

The device, known as the "Brain Port," was pioneered more than 30 years ago by Paul Bach-y-Rita, a University of Wisconsin neuroscientist. He began routing images from a camera through electrodes taped to people's backs and later discovered the tongue was a superior transmitter.

Normally I would go over all the potential advancements heralded by the research itself. But today, I think it might be more important simply to point out that this new strain of research is being done, and who is doing it. Why?

Because here we see the military working very seriously to create augmented human troops -- "super-soldiers." And because there are a few potential "tipping points" when it comes to the emergence of widespread human augmentation research -- turning points after which radical human augmentation becomes far more likely. Frankly, a major push by the U.S. military to develop superhuman troops is one of the most obvious. Again, why?

The U.S. military can't really afford to be caught behind the power curve on human enhancement tech on the battlefield. Nor can they really afford for U.S. scientists (in the military-industrial complex or otherwise) to fall behind either. And as this sensory enhancement research joins augmented reality displays, power armor, nootropics and other lines of inquiry being paid for by the Pentagon, we can see that with so much money being used to explore so many different augmentation options, eventually these researchers will hit paydirt.

In fact, they'll probably hit it several times. And because it's really hard to take that kind of technology away from the Pentagon for any reason, political or otherwise, that cat will probably stay out of the bag.

Which means the very fact this research exists may in some ways be more important than what they find. Human augmentation research has now been deemed acceptable by one of the most important funding sources in existance. Whatever the consequences, a continued drive for military breakthroughs will reshape this field.


Future Imperative

This news release from Case Law School reflects some of the growing interest in human enhancement research... and organizations' strong desire to stay on the ethical high ground when they undertake this work.

Researchers and bioethicists have developed guidelines for therapeutic research to protect human subjects in clinical experiments involving genetic technologies. Professor Mehlman's grant, "Protecting Human Subjects in Genetic Enhancement Research," will examine whether special protection is needed for subjects in enhancement research.

"Little thought has been given to this topic so far," says Professor Mehlman. "How do we measure and value the benefits, other than examining feedback from the subjects themselves? Special protections are needed for vulnerable populations, such as military personnel, athletes, and workers, who might come under pressure to use enhancement drugs to improve job performance."

I like these comments from Professor Mehlman. Obviously feedback from people actually experiencing a modification have more direct relevance than the speculations of armchair philosophers or self-interested executives and other leaders. There is at least one nootropic on the market that greatly increases motivation and efficiency that some users have stated alters the quality of their lives -- not by making them unhappy, but by making their work more interesting and exciting to them than the parts of their lives they normally cherish.

That transformation, of course, is exactly the kind of "nightmare" many enhancement critics fear. A dedicated effort to see how an augmentation might alter a subject's personality -- from both their perspective and from whatever objective and subjective outside perspectives you can muster -- is exactly what you need so that people can embrace, reject or offer qualified acceptance to any particular modification.

Mehlman's point about protecting vulnerable populations is also extremely well taken. Ironically, many of our supposedly "privileged" or elite workers are most vulnerable to these pressures. Certainly enhancing soldiers and athletes can have a profound impact upon their performance, but imagine the consequences of dramatically increasing the intelligence of your entire scientific research base. And radically augmenting the intellect of all of your engineers, your business executives, your political leaders, etc.

So many people would find their output immeasurably improved by skyrocketing intelligence and creativity that it is almost impossible to ignore the likely consequences. Assuming workers' rights are not carefully maintained and, equally important, augmentations are not carefully assessed to see exactly which ones have side effects, be they negative in nature, or merely annoying or... different. (Like the pill-using worker who suddenly finds s/he is not simply more effective, but enraptured with their day job.)

The press release continues:

The project will identify the ethically-relevant differences between therapeutic and enhancement genetic research and analyze them in light of the ethical principles that govern human subjects research generally and genetic research in particular. Researchers will determine whether there are any conditions under which it would be ethical to conduct research on genetic enhancement using human subjects.

Based on their findings, the investigators will propose changes in existing rules and regulations to govern research on genetic enhancement using human subjects.

Professor Mehlman's grant makes up part of his work for CGREAL (Center for Genetic Research Ethics and Law), a five-year interdisciplinary project at Case. The high quality of interdisciplinary work at Case Western Reserve University led the NIH in 2003 to designate the school one of only four "centers of excellence" in the study of the ethical, legal and social implications of human genetics. Professor Mehlman was appointed Associate Director for Public Policy and Director of the Genetic Enhancement research group.

Maxwell Mehlman's research will no doubt be of great interest to those following the debate over human enhancement. One point that is particularly curious is that we seem to be moving beyond the question of whether or not we should ban certain forms of medical research -- like curing babies of the painful death of Tay-Sachs disease with gene therapy -- lest we incidentally make discoveries that promote human enhancement.

A careful, reasoned look at the pros and cons of human augmentation is more apt to create ethical guidelines that stick than a simple, broad-based ban... especially a ban that takes in unrelated therapeutic research like Tay-Sachs or cystic fibrosis. Mehlman's report may be an important step in deciding just what red lines we wish to enforce, if any.

Future Imperative

I was reading an older podcast interview on NeoFiles recently, in which R.U. Sirius was talking to Michael Chorost, author Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human. Chorost's book is about how having a computer implanted in his skull partially restored his hearing.

But in the midst of this interview, Chorost offered an interesting observation. He noted that the "deaf community" is an extremely close and welcoming subculture, and that many deaf people view the hearing-enabled as the handicapped members of society. Apparently, "listening" to someone when you are deaf and must read their sign language gestures or their lips requires much more active engagement in the conversation than simply listening to them with your ears.
Now, there are evidently other reasons why the deaf may have a particularly strong community -- a robust support network is ultimately a survival advantage for those plugged into it. But Chorost's point that this "disabled group" might actually have a profound emotional/social advantage over the rest of us is a critical issue for those of us interested in any form of radical human enhancement.

Why? Let us take another example. Many people envision an ultimate intellect as being purely rational, its logic untainted by emotional baggage. Yet arguably, a lack of emotion, particularly a lack of emotional bonds with other people, is a hallmark of the classic psychopath.

Is it possible that we could successfully create a truly enhanced human being and yet sabotague an element of the psyche that most would deem critical to being merely an advanced (or even adequate) human being? We could, of course, argue that even if such capacities were lost, our first-generation, engineered, "posthuman entity" would eventually rediscover these gifts, if only because their mind would be capable of looking at so many aspects of human and posthuman intelligence, and they would inevitably see the value in any lost abilities.

But honestly, if we look at the "weak superintelligence" derived from, say, accelerating the speed of someone's brain to phenomenal levels, one has to ask: Would a psychopath learn to value their missing compassion? Even if they had a long time to think about it?

Would the hearing-enabled, in our world, willingly render themselves deaf, even if they knew they would be embraced by a community and circle of friends some may bitterly miss in their own lives? Or would someone used to using a motivation/energy enhancer such as modafinil choose to lose their edge after they came to accept its existence as part of their lives, and were no longer wistful for, or frequently reminded of, the days when they were more emotionally balanced?

The answer to that last question is probably yes more often than not, but the point remains, it is possible to have a completely worthwhile human enhancement that in some ways limits us -- whether emotionally, or in terms of our creativity, spontaneity, mental precision, charisma, sense of humor, empathic skills, etc.

This reservation, far from constituting a reason to avoid all human enhancement, may in fact be a reason to pursue a very, very wide variety of human enhancement research projects. We appear to have a formidable range of augmentation options available to us already -- either present now or immanent -- so we should be aware of potential drawbacks in each and every enhancement technology and discipline.

Some people may consider particular weaknesses to be advantges -- the ambitious worker who embraces the monomaniacal focus of modafinil, the calm individual who enjoys the greater serenity of deep meditation, the angry youth who has no problem with the violence and attitude of a hyper-aggressive school of the martial arts. But faced with a sufficiently broad array of options, first-adopter, human-enhancement enthusiasts will be able to choose those augmentations that work best for their goals and their lives. And like a deaf teen or adult weighing a cochlear implant, they will be able to measure what would be gained against what they may be giving up.


Future Imperative

A press release from the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System describes research pinpointing a single gene which significantly impacts human intelligence.

04/28/2006
Psychiatric researchers at The Zucker Hillside Hospital campus of The Feinstein Institute for Medical Research have uncovered evidence of a gene that appears to influence intelligence. Working in conjunction with researchers at Harvard Partners Center for Genetics and Genomics in Boston, the Zucker Hillside team examined the genetic blueprints of individuals with schizophrenia, a neuropsychiatric disorder characterized by cognitive impairment, and compared them with healthy volunteers. They discovered that the dysbindin-1 gene (DTNBP1), which they previously demonstrated to be associated with schizophrenia, may also be linked to general cognitive ability. The study is being published in the May 15 print issue of Human Molecular Genetics, available online today, April 27.

"A robust body of evidence suggests that cognitive abilities, particularly intelligence, are significantly influenced by genetic factors. Existing data already suggests that dysbindin may influence cognition," said Katherine Burdick, PhD, the study’s primary author. "We looked at several DNA sequence variations within the dysbindin gene and found one of them to be significantly associated with lower general cognitive ability in carriers of the risk variant compared with non-carriers in two independent groups."

The study involved 213 unrelated Caucasian patients with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder and 126 unrelated healthy Caucasian volunteers. The researchers measured cognitive performance in all subjects. They then analyzed participants’ DNA samples. The researchers specifically examined six DNA sequence variations, also known as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), in the dysbindin gene and found that one specific pattern of SNPs, known as a haplotype, was associated with general cognitive ability: Cognition was significantly impaired in carriers of the risk variant in both the schizophrenia group and the healthy volunteers as compared with the non-carriers.

“While our data suggests the dysbindin gene influences variation in human cognitive ability and intelligence, it only explained a small proportion of it - about 3 percent. This supports a model involving multiple genetic and environmental influences on intelligence,” said Anil Malhotra, MD, principal investigator of the study.

The specific role of dysbindin in the central nervous system is unknown, but it is highly present in key brain regions linked to cognition, including learning, problem solving, judgment, memory and comprehension. Scientists speculate that dysbindin plays a role in communication between brain cells in these regions and helps promote their survival. An alteration in the genetic blueprint for dysbindin may ultimately interfere with cell communication and fail to protect brain cells from dying, with a resulting negative impact on cognition and intelligence.

The study was funded by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health; National Institute of Child Health and Human Development; NARSAD, The Mental Health Research Foundation (formerly known as National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression); and Stanley Medical Research Institute.

The impact of this gene is seemingly small, but it reflects a fascinating potential form of broad-based human enhancement. What would happen if you had two or three genes which each diminished your overall intellect by roughly 3 percent? What if there were a perfectly safe and easy form of gene therapy that could repair them? And if they were repaired, how would you perceive the subsequent, substantial improvement in your intelligence?

If there turn out to be many such flaws in human genetics, and some societies eventually choose to use gene therapy to clear them all up, will we not be engaging in a large scale "human augmentation" program? Even if we describe it as merely therapeutic?


Future Imperative