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Researchers are now examining a slate of physical "biomarkers" -- such as long-term physiological changes in the brain and alterations in brain structure -- that suggest a biological basis for PTSD.
Scientists already know EXACTLY which gene to knock out to give rodents a full blown case of PTSD from birth.
But we can't mention its name because we're too close to 2008.
If one breeds rodents with that particular gene knocked out, those rodents will develop chronic PTSD from a small electric shock that any normal rodent would treat as an annoyance and shake off right away.
It's the gene for a particular brain chemical receptor, for the brain chemical that controls the ability to keep traumatic memories from dominating all other information in the brain.
In other words, it's the chemical that controls your ability to forget.
Forgetting is an important as remembering -- perhaps even more so, since only a tiny fraction of the things one sees and hears and feels every day is actually useful for reproduction and survival. If people remembered EVERYTHING, they wouldn't be able to think or even learn.
Researchers in physics education have discovered that forgetting is as important as remembering during the process of learning freshman physics. To learn physics right, you have to be able to forget all the wrong things you learned before you signed up for the class.
That's the part that really throws most freshman physics students, actually.
They learn the right thing but fail to forget the wrong thing. So on exams they write down a combination of the right things they remembered, and the wrong things they failed to forget.
This gene also regulates the deep delta phase of sleep, the generation of new brain cells, and your body's natural defense system against nausea, pain, osteoporosis, intestinal inflammation and at least nine different kinds of soft tissue cancers.
But I won't say what that gene is, in keeping with the standard of strict censorship that this article obeys.
Salon is gearing up for 2008 and I foresee that a certain genetic subpopulation (one that is genetically doomed to be highly prone to PTSD) is going to be targeted once again as public enemy number one.
The Democratic campaign to demonize this genetic subpopulation will be held up as proof to Republicans that liberals aren't so amoral after all.
But what was the name of that gene?
Look it up yourselves. You're on your own now.
It's no longer my job to point out when the Eastern Front has been edited out of WWII to keep children's textbooks safe from Communism.
(If you don't understand that last remark, then examine the last few letters I wrote.)
I've held that job since I was eleven years old and I'm retiring as of today. It's too big of a job, the work never ends, the pay is zero, and I feel too much rage over that kind of manipulation to want to get up close to it and fight it any longer.
If censorship is what you want -- then have it!
But you'll never be able to cure PTSD without talking about that damned gene.
