From: John Clark (jonkc@worldnet.att.net)
Date: Fri Sep 03 1999 - 23:08:08 MDT
Robert J. Bradbury <bradbury@www.aeiveos.com> Wrote:
>What the original article was about was about affecting long
>term potentiation and *MEMORY*.
It's more than memory, although that alone would be a very big deal
they did great even on tests that did not require improved memory.
In one test a tone was sounded a few seconds before an electrical
shock was given, the Doogie mice learned faster than the wild mice
that the tone meant danger. That's intelligence. Even more impressive the
Doogie mice learned much better when their old ideas no longer worked;
after a while the tone still sounded but the shock no longer came, the wild
mice were much slower in figuring out that the tone no longer meant danger.
To quote from the article " transgenic mice are quicker to learn to disassociate
the previously paired events". You can't do that with improved memory alone.
Speaking of memory, this is the clearest indication yet that Long
Term Potentiation is memory, or at least a good part of it is .
It's been shown before that slowing down LTP over what's found in
nature hurt memory, but this is the first time it's been shown that
speeding it up helps memory. That alone is worth a Nobel Prize.
>I'm very surprised that Science let the article go
>to press the way that they did
The article explains what changes were made to the mice and how
they were made, then they report on how the modified mice did
when they took several standard tests, what is your objection to that?
By the way, the article is in Nature not Science.
John K Clark jonkc@att.net
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