More complex causes of crazy

In this week's (March 28, 2016) issue of The New Yorker Magazine is an excellent article by Siddhartha Mukherjee about the craziness, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, that has affected several of the men in his family.  He relates the histories of his uncles and his brothers.

But the article is really about two researchers in Boston, Beth Stevens and Steve McCaroll, who have tracked down a gene that seems to be a major player in what happens in some brains to make them  function differently.  It seems to have to due with  a gene, C4A,  that regulates the proteins that usually prune certain synapses that are used for cognition and planning.

If this turns out to be part of what happens in the brains of the people who then develop the kinds of symptoms that are labelled as psychiatric diseases. One would hope that this knowledge would be a big step toward finding a more successful treatment.  But S. M. does a good job of showing how much more complex all of this is.

Genes  do play a big role in disrupting a person's thoughts and ideas, but these genes do a lot of other things too, so that if we do eventually find ways to change a group of genes -- we can already modify a single gene -- it will still be very difficult to know what those changes that will produce. There is lots of room for unintended consequences here.  How much it will alter how the person thinks, and really, who that person is.?  S.M. makes that very clear at the end of the article. He only knew his brothers the way they were.  Knowing them was knowing them with their moods and struggles.  Would it be possible to separate out just the difficult parts?

Also, it is still not known what the circumstances are necessary to be to get the C4A toast in the way that seems to be detrimental.  It may be just a random mutation and it just happens, or, more likely, it needs some kind of trigger at some specific time to make it happen.  This seems to be true with most gene expressions.  If the circumstances aren't there then little, or nothing happens.  I don't know.  And I don't think there are too many more specific answers yet.

Will we know more?  That I think is pretty certain.  But I don't know if it will just pose new questions and lead to longer hallways that need to be explored.

Life is complex.  Even more than we expected.  That is what we have learned so far.