How could finding a gene for manic depression actually then lead to a new drug?
A. Finding a gene for manic depression is going to be the beginning of finding new treatments. At the moment, the treatments that we have, we don’t even know how they work. So imagine that, say, a sequence of nerve cells communicating in the brain has one that’s just not quite doing the job correctly. That gene specifies where the problem is. We can then design new medicines that go in and target just where that one defect is, and just correct that. That will offer much more specificity than the current medicines and obviously, less side effects. Q. If there are a number of genes that all contribute towards manic depression, isn’t it possible that all those different genes are doing different things in the brain? A. That’s a possibility — that several genes are all coming in at different points, affecting your mood, making it go up or down in a pathological way. An alternate view, and there’s precedent for both of these, would be that there’s a pathway, a sequence of events that leads
