[ExI] Smarter mice

James Clement clementlawyer at gmail.com
Tue Dec 9 20:32:19 UTC 2014


On Tue, Dec 9, 2014 at 3:10 AM, BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:

> <
> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26639-the-smart-mouse-with-the-halfhuman-brain.html
> >
>
>
I spent quite a bit of time visiting with Steve Goldman and his wife Maiken
Nedergaard, in Rochester, NY in 2010. They had already done similar
experiments described in this article, but the foundation that had given
grants for the study would not allow them to report on such because many of
the donors to that foundation were religious and the foundation didn't want
the negative publicity ("Playing God") to blow back on them. At that time,
they'd used what are called "Shiverer mice
<http://jaxmice.jax.org/strain/001428.html>" (lacking adequate myelin and
thus having tremors that made them look like they where shivering all of
the time). Not only did the glial cell implantation cure this, but the mice
grew up to be substantially smarter than normal mice. Maiken told me that
they "squeaked" differently, and would sit together in separate parts of
cages from the "normal" mice, talking with each other. At least at that
time, they were ordered by their sponsor not to do any further intelligence
tests on these mice. Everything that's come out since then (2013 and 2014)
has been recreations of these experiments using different funding, so they
could at least report on their findings.  Goldman and Nedergaard's
experiments are primarily concerned with finding ways to remyelinate
damaged brains, but they both realize that if used in "normal" people,
would likely lead to enhanced intelligence. Of course there's no easy
funding for this, at least at this time.

James
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