A work recently published by the magazine Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, points out that the deactivation of a gene has achieved that laboratory rats reach intelligence levels higher than those that were born with the activated gene. This has made me wonder about the paths that the future can offer us, and specifically, to ask you if you would agree to make your children smarter by genetic manipulation.
This work has led the scientific community to wonder about the effects of this gene's activation and about what its deactivation could cause in humans.
The gene, which humans and rats possess, when deactivated, managed to get the animals to get better scores in orientation tests in labyrinths and in their memory. The plasticity of the synapses improves with the deactivation of part of the gene.
The gene acts on regions of the hippocampus, where memory and learning are housed. Although no one has proposed this type of experimentation with humans, it is amazing to think that our brains and those of our children could function with greater capacity.
These discoveries, although for now they have little possible application in people, make us think about everything our children can achieve and the possible applications that could be proposed in the future.
Genetic research is sometimes scary, and above all, it is scary to think that we can one day achieve improvements in humans with laboratory techniques.
And, therefore, I leave you my question: if it were safeyou would agree to improve your children's intelligence by scientific means such as the manipulation of their genes?
