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SMART GENES A large genetic study turns up more genes that may help build intelligence into the brain.
Smarty-pants have 40 new reasons to thank their parents for their powerful brains.
By sifting through the genetics of nearly 80,000 people, researchers have uncovered 40 genes that may make certain people smarter. That brings the total number of suspected "intelligence genes" to 52.
Combined, these genetic attributes
explain only a very small amount of overall smarts, or lack thereof, researchers write online May 22 in
Nature Genetics. But studying these genes, many of which play roles in brain cell development, may ultimately help scientists understand how intelligence is built into brains.
Historically, intelligence research has been mired in controversy, says neuroscientist Richard Haier of the University of California, Irvine. Scientists disagreed on whether intelligence could actually be measured and if so, whether genes had anything at all to do with the trait, as opposed to education and other life experiences. But now "we are so many light-years beyond that, as you can see from studies like this," says Haier. "This is very exciting and very positive news."
The results were possible only because of the gigantic number of people studied, says study coauthor Danielle Posthuma, a geneticist at VU University Amsterdam. She and colleagues combined data from 13 earlier studies on intelligence, some published and some unpublished. Posthuma and her team looked for links between intelligence scores, measured in different ways in the studies, and variations held in the genetic instruction books of 78,308 children and adults. Called a genome-wide association study or GWAS, the method looks for signs that certain quirks in people's genomes are related to a trait.
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