In Practice

Thank you for the enlightening post on a very interesting topic. As a first year psychiatry intern, I really appreciate reading your posts, which keep me abreast of the latest developments in psychiatry even when I'm on non-psychiatric rotations.

One thing I was wondering: did you mean to say that relative to worms, mammals only have 1.5 times the number of genes, but many times more noncoding DNA? I think worms, at least c. elegans, have about 100 million base pairs, compared to several billion for humans.

I find it interesting that society in general is always trying to change the "timid". In truth the timid do suffer more abuse which leads to depression but sometimes being timid saves your life.

This is a very complex question and changing our genes so we no longer have that aspect of personality isn't necessarily the answer.

If you prevent or reverse the methylation of key parts of my DNA complex through drugs, you may truly prevent the effects of intimidation but what will I change into? Is there not a part of humans that although it enables us to be intimidated it also enables to be empathic to all? How closely linked is the ability to be empathic to the "ability" to be intimidated?

You earned it. My intuition agrees with your insights on this article. I'm not very generous when it comes to high grades. Someone is finally going in the right direction. Yay!

"And epigenetic change may be heritable change ... within the given mouse, though, of course, not in its sperm or eggs."

Is this contradictory?