serotonin transporter gene

Tag archives for serotonin transporter gene

After I wrote in my Atlantic article about getting my serotonin transporter gene assayed (which revealed that I carry that gene’s apparently more plastic short-short form), I started getting a lot of email — several a week — from readers asking how to have their SERT gene tested.  This led to an interesting hunt.  It…

Jonah Lehrer’s story on “Depression’s Upside” has created quite a kerfuffle.  The idea he explores — that depression creates an analytic, ruminative focus that generates useful insight — sits badly with quite a few people.  It’s not a brand-new idea, by any means; as Jonah notes, it goes back at least to Aristotle.  But Jonah…

The video interview above, with NIH primatologist Stephen Suomi, is embedded within a feature of mine that that appeared today at The Atlantic website — and is in the December 2009 issue now shipping — about a new hypothesis in behavioral genetics.  This emerging hypothesis, which draws on substantial data, much of which has gone…

Big psych news of the day is that a big JAMA study debunked the “depression gene” — that is, this big new study (by Risch et alia, in JAMA, today) found that, contrary to a famous earlier big study (Caspi et alia, in Science, 2003), the short (“bad”) form of a particular gene called 5-HTT…