Rome 2008

Genetics of behaviour and psychiatric disorders:
from society to the lab and back

EMBL, Monterondo (Rome)
28 September - 4 October 2008

Behavioural genetics, and in particular the genetic investigation of psychiatric disorders, are scientific practices with enormous societal relevance. Ongoing advances in these fields aim to explain in genetic and molecular units mental dysfunctions with heavy societal burdens as well as behavioural patterns that are pertinent to a vast array of an individual’s social competences and strategies to respond to the environment as well as to social norms and procedures. Experimentation in these fields cannot afford, therefore, to move on unaware of its contextualisation in contemporary society and without an assessment of its impact on many aspects of our lives, especially the understanding of disease, normality, subjectivity and equality. The conceptual shift in biological psychiatry inscribes behaviours and psychiatric conditions as reducible to the operations of the brain and has accentuated their abstraction from society. This has the consequence of lifting them from the cultural frameworks of motives, meaning and responsibility that are normally applied to social objects. However, psychiatric disorders are simply not independent from societal forces and mechanisms.

What are the challenges of investigating the genetic origins of behavioural traits and psychiatric conditions in the laboratory?

Developments in behavioural genetics have revealed some of the biological aetiologies of various behavioural traits. At the same time, they have given origin to new ways of representing them and they have created new ‘objects’ (e.g. measurable phenotypes, susceptibility genes, lab behavioural tests etc) that reify these behaviours and make them shuttle between the social context and the laboratory. The aim of the first Neuroschool was to assess the rigour and precision of current methodologies and limitations of experimentation in behavioural genetics and to discuss its contextualisation in contemporary society.

Topics and questions included:

What are the intrinsic difficulties in defining the phenotypes to be investigated? How can a valid definition of a psychiatric condition reconcile biological universalism with social and cultural aspects? How can the latter be incorporated into laboratory experimentation? What is the history of specific psychiatric conditions? How has their classification changed? How can complex behaviours be ‘isolated’ and ‘measured’ in the laboratory, especially using animal models? What are the current tools available to measure genetic variation among individuals? How do we incorporate biographical, life-trajectory data into the environmental component? What are the social mechanisms (e.g. medicalising forces, social norms etc) that increase the number of non-pathological behaviours being brought under the scrutiny of medicine and genetics? What is their influence on genetics? What are the limitations of the current psychiatric classification system and how could we reformulate it to make more sense of biological investigations of behaviour? How can we control and limit the number of different spurious traits that land as illnesses on the bench of behavioural genetics laboratories?