Smart Genes?

Monday, Sep. 13, 1999 By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

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There remains the nagging question of what it means precisely to say that Tsien & Co. have created a smarter mouse. "What is it that is being tested?" asks Gerald Fischbach, director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. "That's the problem with mouse behavior. It's not clear that we're talking about the same thing when we talk about learning in a rodent and learning in a human."

Tsien concedes that using the emotive word intelligence in the paper was sure to generate controversy. "We really don't mean to suggest," he explains, "that human intelligence is the same as animal intelligence. But I would argue that problem solving is clearly part of intelligence, and learning and memory are crucial to problem solving. And these mice are better learners, with better memories, than other mice."

But Tsien doesn't claim that he and his colleagues have found the unique genetic key to intelligence or even to memory. "It's likely that brain plasticity involves many molecules," he says. "This is just one of them." On the other hand, he asserts--and his critics would not disagree--that "intelligence does arise out of biology, at least in part." How much remains the great question. Whatever the answer, little Doogie surely represents an important step in unraveling what role our genes play in constructing not just memory but all the other attributes of the human mind. And clearly he won't be the last.

--With reporting by David Bjerklie and Alice Park/New York, J. Madeleine Nash/Chicago and Dick Thompson/Washington

With reporting by David Bjerklie and Alice Park/New York, J. Madeleine Nash/Chicago and Dick Thompson/Washington