serotonin transporter gene
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Tag archives for serotonin transporter gene
Your genetic info — not free, easy, or clear
Posted by David Dobbs on April 1, 2010 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…
Does depression have an upside? It’s complicated.
Posted by David Dobbs on March 9, 2010 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…
I’m not vulnerable, just especially plastic. Risk genes, environment, and evolution, in the Atlantic
Posted by David Dobbs on November 10, 2009 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…
The (Illusory) Rise and Fall of the “Depression Gene”
Posted by David Dobbs on June 17, 2009 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…