SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
Life-Long Intelligence in the Genes
from Nature News
A Scottish intelligence study that began 80 years ago has borne new fruit. Researchers have
tracked down the study's surviving participants--who joined the study when they were 11 years
old--to estimate the role that our genes have in maintaining intelligence through to old age.
Researchers have long been interested in understanding how cognition changes with age, and why
these changes are more rapid in some people than in others. But, in the past, studies of
age-related intelligence changes were often performed when the subjects were already elderly.
Then, in the late 1990s, research psychologist Ian Deary of the University of Edinburgh, UK,
and his colleagues realized that Scotland had two data sets that would allow them to take such
studies a step further. In 1932 and 1947, officials had conducted a sweeping study of
intelligence among thousands of 11-year-old Scottish children. The data, Deary learned, had been
kept confidential for decades.
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