Re: [CTRL] do we now need smarter mousetraps?
-Caveat Lector- I got an albino boa that will make short work of all them meeses...no matter how smart they is...God makes the best mouse traps...just gotta get over that serpentine phobia "Taylor, John (JH)" wrote: -Caveat Lector- N.Y. Times September 7, 1999 SCIENTIST AT WORK / Dr. Joe Z. Tsien Of Smart Mice and an Even Smarter Man By NICHOLAS WADE PRINCETON, N.J. -- A certain amount of disorder has broken out around Dr. Joe Z. Tsien, the biologist who announced last week that he had created a smarter strain of mouse by genetically altering a gene for memory. Dr. Joe Z. Tsien with a supersmart mouse he genetically engineered in a conference room at Princeton University. The research may shed light on human intelligence. Patients call seeking help. Individuals of enhanced imaginations warn that the mice may escape and take over the planet. Television crews patrol the halls. His voice-mail box has overflowed. But Dr. Tsien, seemingly the only scientist on the Princeton campus who, on a warm summer day, is wearing a tie, ignores the chaos and a phone that rings every couple of minutes. In soft tones he describes the remarkable journey that has led him from Wuxi, a small town near Shanghai, to the position of having made a significant, maybe decisive, contribution to understanding the nature of memory and intelligence. Dr. Tsien (pronounced chee-YEN) says he did not begin to consider the wider implications of his work until just before his article was published. He engineered his smarter mice for purely academic reasons, to address and perhaps solve the question of how memories are laid down in the brain. But the mice turned out to be smarter as well as having better memories, lending an unexpected new dimension to the experiment. Although many arguments with psychologists doubtless lie ahead, Dr. Tsien believes that learning, memory and intelligence are all intimately related because, as his smarter mice demonstrate, "a common unifying mechanism underlies them all." And because mice and people use the same basic mechanism of memory, the smarter mice could well shed much light on the nature of human intelligence. Dr. Tsien's result, as he is the first to note, rests on knowledge and techniques developed by other scientists. He describes his experiment as "obvious" -- at least in retrospect. His achievement lies in the fact that, in a highly competitive field of biology, he was the first to conceive of the experiment and to see that it could be decisive. He also carried it out in a particularly convincing way. "Extremely nicely done," was the verdict of Dr. Eric R. Kandel, a leading biologist at Columbia University and the former laboratory chief of Dr. Tsien. The idea that led to the smarter mice was no lucky break. Rather, it was a feat for which Dr. Tsien had been preparing intensively for many years, including seven years of postdoctoral education. In Wuxi, where his father was a clerk and his mother an accountant, he was the only person to enter college from his high school, one attached to a fabric plant. But the college was a good one, the East China Normal University in Shanghai, and he decided to do doctoral studies in the United States. "In 1986, China was still very closed, so we really had no idea about the United States," Dr. Tsien says in describing how he picked a college. He chose the University of Minnesota because it offered to waive the application fee, which he could not afford, and because the Chinese characters for Minnesota translated invitingly to "clean air blue sky." Having recovered from the surprise of finding the clean-air-blue-sky state so cold, he developed an interest in neurophysiology and the instruments then available for monitoring the electrical signals transmitted by brain cells. "I got fascinated by seeing a nerve cell fire. They are talking -- what does that mean?" he says. A long apprenticeship was necessary before he could begin to parse that language. He did his Ph.D. thesis with Dr. Lester R. Drewes of the University of Minnesota, helping him conduct studies under a Defense Department grant on how the warfare agent sarin blocks the transmission of nervous signals. Receiving his Ph.D. in 1990, he was accepted as a postdoctoral student by Dr. Kandel's laboratory. There he worked on identifying genes that are active in rats' brains during memory formation. "I got a more systematic education in neuroscience. I got to see how a big lab operates," Dr. Tsien said. He then moved to another leading neuroscience laboratory, that of Dr. Susumu Tonegawa at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Tonegawa won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1987 for research on the genetic control of the immune system, and later switched to the study of learning. In Dr. Tonegawa's lab, Dr. Tsien worked with so-called knock-out mice, animals from which a gene
[CTRL] do we now need smarter mousetraps?
-Caveat Lector- N.Y. Times September 7, 1999 SCIENTIST AT WORK / Dr. Joe Z. Tsien Of Smart Mice and an Even Smarter Man By NICHOLAS WADE PRINCETON, N.J. -- A certain amount of disorder has broken out around Dr. Joe Z. Tsien, the biologist who announced last week that he had created a smarter strain of mouse by genetically altering a gene for memory. Dr. Joe Z. Tsien with a supersmart mouse he genetically engineered in a conference room at Princeton University. The research may shed light on human intelligence. Patients call seeking help. Individuals of enhanced imaginations warn that the mice may escape and take over the planet. Television crews patrol the halls. His voice-mail box has overflowed. But Dr. Tsien, seemingly the only scientist on the Princeton campus who, on a warm summer day, is wearing a tie, ignores the chaos and a phone that rings every couple of minutes. In soft tones he describes the remarkable journey that has led him from Wuxi, a small town near Shanghai, to the position of having made a significant, maybe decisive, contribution to understanding the nature of memory and intelligence. Dr. Tsien (pronounced chee-YEN) says he did not begin to consider the wider implications of his work until just before his article was published. He engineered his smarter mice for purely academic reasons, to address and perhaps solve the question of how memories are laid down in the brain. But the mice turned out to be smarter as well as having better memories, lending an unexpected new dimension to the experiment. Although many arguments with psychologists doubtless lie ahead, Dr. Tsien believes that learning, memory and intelligence are all intimately related because, as his smarter mice demonstrate, "a common unifying mechanism underlies them all." And because mice and people use the same basic mechanism of memory, the smarter mice could well shed much light on the nature of human intelligence. Dr. Tsien's result, as he is the first to note, rests on knowledge and techniques developed by other scientists. He describes his experiment as "obvious" -- at least in retrospect. His achievement lies in the fact that, in a highly competitive field of biology, he was the first to conceive of the experiment and to see that it could be decisive. He also carried it out in a particularly convincing way. "Extremely nicely done," was the verdict of Dr. Eric R. Kandel, a leading biologist at Columbia University and the former laboratory chief of Dr. Tsien. The idea that led to the smarter mice was no lucky break. Rather, it was a feat for which Dr. Tsien had been preparing intensively for many years, including seven years of postdoctoral education. In Wuxi, where his father was a clerk and his mother an accountant, he was the only person to enter college from his high school, one attached to a fabric plant. But the college was a good one, the East China Normal University in Shanghai, and he decided to do doctoral studies in the United States. "In 1986, China was still very closed, so we really had no idea about the United States," Dr. Tsien says in describing how he picked a college. He chose the University of Minnesota because it offered to waive the application fee, which he could not afford, and because the Chinese characters for Minnesota translated invitingly to "clean air blue sky." Having recovered from the surprise of finding the clean-air-blue-sky state so cold, he developed an interest in neurophysiology and the instruments then available for monitoring the electrical signals transmitted by brain cells. "I got fascinated by seeing a nerve cell fire. They are talking -- what does that mean?" he says. A long apprenticeship was necessary before he could begin to parse that language. He did his Ph.D. thesis with Dr. Lester R. Drewes of the University of Minnesota, helping him conduct studies under a Defense Department grant on how the warfare agent sarin blocks the transmission of nervous signals. Receiving his Ph.D. in 1990, he was accepted as a postdoctoral student by Dr. Kandel's laboratory. There he worked on identifying genes that are active in rats' brains during memory formation. "I got a more systematic education in neuroscience. I got to see how a big lab operates," Dr. Tsien said. He then moved to another leading neuroscience laboratory, that of Dr. Susumu Tonegawa at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Tonegawa won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1987 for research on the genetic control of the immune system, and later switched to the study of learning. In Dr. Tonegawa's lab, Dr. Tsien worked with so-called knock-out mice, animals from which a gene has been deleted. The idea is to learn what a gene does by excising it and seeing what defects the mouse develops. He became interested in the brain cell component, known as the NMDA receptor, suspected of being central to the memory mechanism. The receptor consists of parts made by several genes, the
