Retarded mice get smarter with drug

Sounds like something you should try, cjsha.

What would it hurt?

<trying to stiffle laughter>

I wonder if this means that whatever improvement that is going to happen will happen within three months, and that will be the maximum level of improvement that is achieved.



This is a little worrisome. I wonder if it would be the most ethical thing to improve a person's cognition, so that they learned how to function at one level, knowing that it would then regress after a certain amount of time. Although I guess if you were disabled and had the opportunity to achieve normalcy for even a small amount of time, most people would take that opportunity, no matter how short lived it might turn out to be.

In the case of people with Down's Syndrome though, since there are physical manifestations of the condition that make the person look different, I wonder how the change to normal cognition would affect their emotional health. A friend of mine did a study and found that the more severely mentally challenged a person was, the less prone they were to depression about their condition, due to the simple fact that they were not aware of how different they were or appeared to others in society. She found that those who had only slight mental impairments were more prone to depression, because they were very aware of the fact that they were different and were looked at and treated as such in social situations.

I think there'd be a lot of ethical questions around this, but I think it's interesting and promising research.

You should thank me. I'm just trying to help.

Who me? Okay, thank you, really, I found the article really interesting and I probably wouldn't have seen it if you hadn't posted it.

No aidan, you just popped in there. I certainly hope that we can do something though about the retardation of America before we go the way of the rest of the world. It's getting ugly out there.

In terms of this cj- you did a good thing posting it- because it's interesting and those who work with or care about disabled people in their lives or families will probably be interested in it, and garner some hope for them from it.

I guess I disagree that the rest of the world is ugly or retarded-and anyway, it seems pretty clear this works on an individual basis, and only on those whose brain chemistry is different in a specific way from that which is normal. So we'll have to think of something else to do about group or societal ugliness and retardation-who knows though- maybe it will take a drug- nothing else seems to work.

These mice are not retarded - they are mentally challenged.

Care for some flowers, Algernon?