Genes 2 Brains 2 Mind 2 Me

I’ve heard of mind reading – yes, some folks have actually figured out (here, here, here) how to decode the fMRI signal to literally know what you’re thinking – but am now beginning to wonder where it all ends. In their new paper, “Transcription MRI: A New View of the Living Brain”, by Liu and colleagues [doi: 10.1177/1073858407309746], they describe the use of short oligonucleotides that can hybridize to mRNA transcripts and, due to the presence of a paramagnetic linker on the oligo, also be visualized in the MR scanner.  This is a new technique and the paper runs it alongside more traditional reporter-gene methods (requiring post-mortem tissue however) to validate the specificity and precision of the approach.  Presently, the method is not safe for humans, so only mice need worry about who is looking at their deepest gene expressions.