Studying broken chromosomes can illuminate neuroscience

It is sad, but true, that much of what is known about how human brains work has been learned by studying brains that are broken. Injuries caused by disease or accident show, from the list of functions thus disabled, the jobs of the part of the brain that has been damaged. Similarly, “injuries” to the genome, resulting in the deletion or duplication of stretches of DNA, sometimes have clear effects which can illuminate the functioning of healthy brains. At the AAAS meeting Karen Berman of America’s National Institute of Mental Health and Carrie Bearden of the University of California, Los Angeles, told participants of the latest finding concerning two of these genetic injuries.