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MIT Engineers World's First Schizophrenic Mice
Frosty Piss writes "MIT researchers have created a schizophrenic mouse that pinpoints a gene variation predisposing people to schizophrenia. Research with the mouse may lead to the first genetically targeted drugs for the disease, which affects 1 percent of the population worldwide. This is the first study that uses animals who demonstrate an array of symptoms observed in schizophrenic patients to identify specific genes that predispose people to the disease."
Pinky (or was it the Brain?) was the first schizophrenic mouse.
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im too lazy to go digging around the article, but diagnosing schizophrenia in a human being ... ok.
actually they dont even know how to diagnose it exactly.
"People diagnosed with schizophrenia usually experience a combination of positive (i.e. hallucinations, delusions, racing thoughts), negative (i.e. apathy, lack of emotion, poor or nonexistant social functioning), and cognitive (disorganized thoughts, difficulty concentrating and/or following instructions, difficulty completing tasks, memory problems). "
http://www.schizophrenia.com/diag.php#diagnosis
now, how do you find out if a mouse has those problems?
besides, only a psychiatrist can diagnose schizophrenia, which we learned yesterday from slashdot posters, is just another 'left wing conspiracy' major, an evil liberal arts degree, when what this country really needs is more engineers blah blah blah etc etc etc.
Doesn't really matter - you can swap the button mappings in the driver settings.
Meta will eat itself
I'm all for animal testing and all. I'm no animal rights advocate by a long shot; but intentionally giving mice schizophrenia seems a bit wrong to me. Schizophrenia runs in my family and I want to see a cure as much as anyone else. Therein lies the conflict. I suppose the mouse gets it if the experiment can do some good.
The game.
Schizophrenia is hell, and I don't think I'm stretching that much. This is a geek audience, right? Well, let's just consider a world where you can do a scientific experiment and find a result that only you can confirm. Over and over again.
The standard narrative of schizophrenia that we've all internalized is that it's somehow a weakness of an individual. That can't be true, especially if it can be induced.
Where are we going to find a hippo, 5 gallons of grease, and a tutu, at this time of night?
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To be a white mouse is to be nestled in an alien environment of metal and bars, forced under threat of punishment to perform acts that have no relation to natural instincts, fed an array of processed and unnatural (to a mouse) foods, all while being watched by alien creatures that frequently whisk away your mouse friends and colleagues who, if they are returned, are often physically and psychologically damaged. Frankly, that any white mouse is considered "sane" by the researchers is a very telling commentary about the mental state of those running the laboratory.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Well, being schizophrenic isn't the same as being a sociopath, or even the more fuzzy "being a dick".
A paranoid schizophrenic for example has (at least according to one theory), a pretty fuzzy line between fantasy and reality. At any rate, stuf originating purely in their imagination or beliefs gets mixed with the reality. They might hear voices, see stuff that isn't there, or feel or smell stuff that noone else can perceive. Where you might just imagine telling someone where to shove it, a schizophrenic might actually perceive it as having happened or as in progress. They might become convinced it's telepathy, or some kind of astral projection, or whatever. That is, either that others are able to project their thoughts into their head, or that they themselves have some telepathic or clairvoyance powers. Others might see stuff that's not actually there (e.g., ghosts) or distort their perception of real stuff (e.g., seeing a piece of string on their skin as some mysterious new parasite.)
Well, that's just one of the kinds of schizophrenia, and what I've described there is more like the extreme cases that get sent to a mental institutions. Most people are a lot more mild than that, and either never get diagnosed or are considered harmless enough to just give them some medicine and let them go back home. Plus a lot are intelligent and socially aware enough to know that everyone else will think they're crazy if they go around saying that they see ghosts, and that carries a major social stigma in our society. So they do their best to hide it, and might never get diagnosed at all.
That doesn't, however, mean that they're necessarily "a dick". The cases where the voices told them to do something nasty are actually quite rare, and most might not even hear voices at all, but have some other form of sensory delusions or distortions. A schizophrenic might just as well be a very nice guy or gal, who just happens to see or hear something slightly different than you do. Just because someone sees ghosts, for example, doesn't mean they will go and tell everyone where to shove it and how deep. That ghost might as well tell them to be nice, or do some great work of charity, or reinforce whatever other belief that spawned that bit of imagination in the first place.
The cases where the voices told them that everyone is their enemy and must be elliminated, are actually quite rare. The 1% of the total population being or having at some point been schizophrenic is a _lot_. Plus, as I was saying, there are a lot which never get diagnosed at all. If they all went and did nasty stuff, you'd notice.
So, basically, chances are you've met or interacted daily with one or more people with schizophrenia without even knowing it. And chances are they weren't the obnoxious "dicks" either.
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