I got a great email from Madeline regarding my post on Ob/Comp behavior:

I work at a place that’s doing a bunch of research on specific proteins in the brain, and how changing things so there are greater or lesser levels of them cause different behaviours. Like, “Oh, hey, when the mice overexpress PKC-epsilon, they’re more anxious, and drink more.”
There’s a lot of this going on all over the world, and people are drawing the connections from mouse to human even now. I’m thinking, 10, maybe 20 years, they’ll take a sample of blood, come back with an analysis of which of your genes are expressing what at what levels, and say, “Ok, looks like you might be able to really get some use out of Stoicism… Have you considered it?” or “A lot of people with expression patterns like yours find it helps to write out lists…”

Good stuff.

Yeah....

They were saying as much on NPR the other morning. This along with gene theropy ideas that they were planing to test out on the mice.

One of the things that they were talking about was the ability to create mice through DNA manipulation that would mimic/be like human psychological problems.

The example used was that for one experiment they needed to have paranoid/territorial/aggressive mice. So they kept tweaking things till they got what they wanted. One of the problems that they were having was to come up with tests that would prove that the got the DNA mix right. It's not like a mouse could say…

"Well Doc today I feel that I need to touch every wall of my cage five times and make sure that the north-east corner of my cage has wood chips one inch higher than the rest of the cage"