Blaming your mother’s genes

Perhaps the darkest years of psychiatry spanned the 1950s and 60s, when Bruno Bettelheim’s ‘refridgerator mother’ model for autism clenched the minds of public and clinician alike in its grip of ‘psychogenic’ causation – and the...

Saving the Autistic Mouse – with Schizophrenia

Mouse ‘models’ for psychiatric disorders, strains of mice genetically engineered by ‘knocking out’ a specific gene that mediates expression of the disorder, provide invaluable information regarding the genetic, developmental, physiological, and...

The Dawn of Darwinian Psychopharmacology

We usually consider medicine as a predictive scientific endeavor, as methodical in application as noble in purpose.  But for some diseases, such as schizophrenia, the first treatments showing any effectiveness, including lithium, chlorpromazine, and even...

Chasing Darwin’s Dulcinea

Heredity is particulate, but development is unitary.  Everything in the organism is the result of the interactions of all genes, subject to the environment to which they are exposed. T. Dobzhansky 1961, p. 111 The chief analytical ultimacy in the new life sciences...

Behind Blue Eyes

Perhaps the main lesson we eventually learn in school is how little we actually know. In elementary genetics, we were taught that there are two alleles for eye color, blue and brown, with brown dominant, allowing simple assessment of whether we were more likely...