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Before thinking this could be a panacea, I suggest you watch the Christian Bale film Equilibrium to see how such a tech could be misused. Ditto for the Reavers in Firefly
Scientific American....
Scientific American....
Recently developed powerful, yet also delicate and refined, genetic tools can inva sively probe nervous systems of animals, far surpassing the safer but much cruder techniques that psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists use to observe the human brain. Now in a remarkable series of experiments, researchers have located a trigger for aggression in mice—providing us with fresh insights into the workings of our human consciousness.
You might object that mice and men are not the same and that studying the murine mind is different from studying the human mind. This fact is obviously true. Yet both Mus musculus and Homo sapiens are nature’s children, sharing much perceptual, cognitive and affective processing. The same process of relentless evolutionary selection has shaped both species—our last common ancestor was a mere 75 million years ago. The structure of their brains, and of their genomes, reflects this similarity. Indeed, only a neuroanatomist can tell a rice grain–size piece of mouse cortex from the same chunk of human cortex. If you think of a mouse as a mere automaton, Google “world’s smartest mouse.†The top hit will be a YouTube video of Brain Storm, a cute brown mouse running a complicated obstacle course—crossing an abyss on a rope; jumping through hoops; going up and down a seesaw, over a pencil, up a steep incline and down a ladder; and navigating around obstacles. It hesitates on occasion, sniffs the air but, once started, speedily completes the circuit.
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You might object that mice and men are not the same and that studying the murine mind is different from studying the human mind. This fact is obviously true. Yet both Mus musculus and Homo sapiens are nature’s children, sharing much perceptual, cognitive and affective processing. The same process of relentless evolutionary selection has shaped both species—our last common ancestor was a mere 75 million years ago. The structure of their brains, and of their genomes, reflects this similarity. Indeed, only a neuroanatomist can tell a rice grain–size piece of mouse cortex from the same chunk of human cortex. If you think of a mouse as a mere automaton, Google “world’s smartest mouse.†The top hit will be a YouTube video of Brain Storm, a cute brown mouse running a complicated obstacle course—crossing an abyss on a rope; jumping through hoops; going up and down a seesaw, over a pencil, up a steep incline and down a ladder; and navigating around obstacles. It hesitates on occasion, sniffs the air but, once started, speedily completes the circuit.
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