[LINK] Social networking science

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

This social networking science research method appears significant .. 

'Crowd-Sourcing Expands Power of Brain Research'

By BENEDICT CAREY www.nytimes.com April 15, 2012

In the largest collaborative study of the brain to date, scientists using 
imaging technology at more than 100 centers worldwide have, for the first 
time, zeroed in on genes that they agree play a role in intelligence and 
memory. (snip)

“What’s really new here is this movement toward crowd-sourcing brain 
research,” said Paul Thompson, a professor of neurology at the University 
of California, and senior author of one of the papers. 

“This is an example of social networking in science, and it gives us a 
power we have not had.” 

“I like this work a lot, because these guys finally did what needed to be 
done to take a real stab at merging imaging and genomics,” said Dr. 
Matthew W. State, a professor of psychiatry at Yale, who was not one of 
the collaborators. 

Brain imaging studies are expensive and, as a result, far too small to 
reliably tease out the effects of common gene variations. To solve the 
numbers problem, Dr. Thompson and three geneticists — Nick Martin and 
Margaret Wright, both of the Queensland Institute of Medical Research in 
Australia, and Barbara Franke of the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical 
Center in the Netherlands — persuaded research centers around the world 
to pool their resources and create one large database. 

It included genetic and extensive brain imaging results from about 21,000 
people. The team then analyzed the collective data to see whether any 
genes were linked to brain structure. 

They agreed on two findings: one gene that correlated strongly with 
overall brain size, and another that correlated with the rate at which 
the hippocampus atrophies, or shrinks, with age. 

People who carried one variant of the overall-size gene had brains that 
were about 1 percent larger than those of people who carried another 
variant. The two variants are equally distributed — about half of people 
have one and half have the other. 

In a separate analysis in Australia, Dr. Martin and Dr. Wright found that 
size correlated with I.Q. 

People with the larger brains scored slightly higher on a standardized 
test. The results are all averages, meaning that they hold for the group 
but say nothing about any individual. (Some very smart people have 
relatively small brains.) 

The collaborators also found that about 10 percent of people carried a 
gene variant that correlated with a slightly accelerated rate of atrophy 
in the hippocampus. 

The hippocampi — there are two, each deep in the brain, one in the right 
side and one in the left, about level with the ears — are needed to form 
new memories. People with dementia often show pronounced atrophy in this 
region. The study was not set up to find a link between the gene variant 
and dementia, but experts suspect a connection. 

The collaboration is not likely to lead to new treatments any time soon, 
the authors said, and, as always, the findings will need replication 
before they are conclusive. It is more a beginning than an end, and it 
illustrates how far the field has to go to get any real traction — and 
what it will take. 

“It means sharing your data, pooling everything,” Dr. Thompson said, “and 
this is not usually how scientists work.”

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Cheers,
Stephen