Home Sequencing Instrumentation Mapping Bioinformatics Functional Genomics ELSI Research Recent Abstracts US,Intl. Human behavioral genetics, a relatively new field, seeks to understand both the genetic and environmental contributions to individual variations in human behavior. That is not an easy task, for the following reasons. It often is difficult to define the behavior in question.
Intelligence is a classic example.
During the late summer of 1999, a Princeton molecular biologist published the results of impressive research in which he enhanced the ability to learn in mice by inserting a gene that codes for a protein in brain cells known to be associated with memory. In reality, there is no universal agreement on the definition of intelligence, even among those who study it for a living. Having established a definition for research purposes, the investigator still must measure the behavior with acceptable degrees of validity and reliability. That is especially difficult for basic personality traits such as shyness or assertiveness, which are the subject of much current research. Sometimes there is an interesting conflation of definition and measurement, as in the case of IQ tests, where the test score itself has come to define the trait it measures.