According to this cite, scientists have found a way to manipulate genes so that the link between motivation and rewards are cut off resulting in ‘drones’, at least in rhesus monkeys. Is this article just full of it or can genes actually be manipulated in such as way to produce genetically engineered slaves?
My advice? Go to the cited journal (Nature Neuroscience) and find out what the scientists * really * did. As opposed to a journalist’s layperson summary. Then draw your conclusions.
As it turns out, the actual article is not in Nature Neuroscience , which may have just published a short summary, but in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Here is a copy of the article, “DNA targeting of rhinal cortex D2 receptor protein reversibly blocks learning of cues that predict reward,” which has only been published online so far. It will appear in the August 9 issue of PNAS.
Here is a much less alarmist summary of the research. Just because the motivational state of the monkeys can be affected in this way doesn’t mean that humans can be “made into slaves.” Humans would still be perfectly aware of other aspects of their environment. Actually, any number of drugs or other treatments that already exist would be much more capable of turning workers “into slaves” than this particular genetic treatment. The article indicates that brain operations can produce the same effect.
Short answer: the actual study says nothing of the sort, you can rest easy tonight without nightmares of hordes of geneticly-induced zombie slaves serving nefarious mad scientists.
Yes, the same team did an earlier study using surgical techniques. You can read an abstract of the article here. As Colibri indicates, the blog was apoplectically wrong.
What they did was build on existing reward-response research. It has long been known that rhesus monkeys can be trained to respond to signals and cues if the “correct” action is rewarded. This applies to other animals, including humans, as well. When I train my dog to sit, what I’m actually doing is getting it to associate food rewards with the cues of my voice saying “Sit!” and a hand signal. In kindergarten, you were trained in how to count by positive reinforcement. None of this is controversial or shocking.
These scientists found that if they removed part of the brain of rhesus monkeys, the ones that had been operated on would not respond appropriately. IOW, the “damaged” (if you will) monkeys failed to adjust their behavior to cues based on rewards. The damaged monkeys did not have the ability to associate the reward with the memory of the cue that produced it. The rhinal cortex is therefore necessary to associate an motivational significance to an incentive.
You could extend this to say that manipulating the limbic system can cause a person to associate motivational or emotional responses to selected cues, but (again as Colibri says) we already knew that.