The Smartest Rat

You may have read a smart rat story from fames and may from novel book or from film about smart rat. Many kind of smart rat story like on cartoon film Mickey Mouse or Tom and Jerry. The scientist also have skittered through movies and books such as Flowers for Algemon and the Secret of NIMH, but all are just a fiction.

The laboratoty experiment have test to the rat smart by traveling task through mazes using partial clues to find rewards, a key method for measuring the rat intelligence. Scientists are too far to try their hobbies to the rat, I think. The rat name Hobbie J when still an embryo at the Medical College of Georgia injected her with genetic material that caused the over expression of the gene NR2B which helps control the rat at which brain cells communicate.

This injection make rat brain cells to communicate for a whisker of second longer than those normal rats. This effect can be concluded as that rat is smarter than the average rat.

NR2B is functioned to improve learning and memory skills and this also seem the similar result to Hobbie-J. But other negative effect also often merge after injected by this substances like dementia and Alzeimer’s disease to the rat.

This experiment is subjected to the rat because genetically modifying of human embryos is not considered ethical; doctors would have to find a way to amplify NR2B expression using drugs instead. The second reasons are mega memory can causes a major burden, even a nightmare to human.