One of the chalk talks that stood out to me was Emily’s research on the role of the zinc finger 804F gene in causing schizophrenic behavior. Although nature and nurture are most likely both involved in the onset of schizophrenia, the high heritability of this psychotic disorder supports the idea that genes may be the more dominant factor, and I thought it was extremely interesting that Emily is working on finding a direct link between our genes and our susceptibility to schizophrenia.
It’s definitely a scary idea to not have control over something as fundamental as our behavior. If the expression of this zinc finger gene does end up correlating with schizophrenia and other neurodegenerative disorders, it would be interesting to see how direct this correlation is and what actions can be taken to prevent those with a high risk of schizophrenia from actually developing psychotic behaviors. Also, the fact that these correlations can be extracted from data on Duke undergraduates is extremely impressive – imagine how far this project could go with a larger dataset!
Overall, I appreciate that Emily’s research hopes to predict the risk of psychopathology especially since early detection of schizophrenic behavior is especially important in improving the chances of recovery. Plus, looking for correlations and other patterns in large databases is something I’m familiar with from my project, so I can relate to what Emily’s life in the lab must be like: figuring out what questions are important to ask and trying to analyze the data to see if it supports these claims. I can’t wait to hear about the results of Emily’s and all our other peers’ research in a few weeks!
