The Seed of Mental Illness Might Be Planted Before Birth

Investigating the link between the placenta and schizophrenia

The Galvins, Don and Mimi and their twelve children, in the late 1960s. (Image courtesy of the Galvin family.)

If you’re feeling nostalgic, it’s easy to smile at the memory of the blinding promise of the Human Genome Project — that highly publicized effort in the 1990s to map out and understand the structure, organization, and function of every single human gene. This was like a moon shot for biology. If the project could successfully figure out the DNA blueprint for building a human, nothing about what we know about virtually any genetic disease would be the same. Soon, all you’d have to do is compare the genomes of a sampling of afflicted people with a control group, and whatever quirk existed in the genome of the sick people would stick out like a sore thumb. Just like that, drug companies would have a gene to target, and we’d have cured a dozen different diseases before lunchtime.

It was a nice dream. But we know better now. A generation has passed since we’ve sequenced the human genome (they got it done in 2003), and instead of finding a smoking-gun mutation responsible for complex conditions like autism or bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, we’ve found hundreds of different mutations (or “variants,” as researchers call them), and none of these variants seem to be quirky enough to cause anything.

I got to know several of the leading researchers into the genetics of mental illness when researching Hidden Valley Road, my account of one extraordinary family’s experience with schizophrenia. Don and Mimi Galvin of Colorado Springs, Colorado, had six sons with schizophrenia, quite the genetic petri dish for researchers to examine. And sure enough, the two separate teams that looked into the Galvins years later found variants that could play a role in the family illness. The catch is, other families with schizophrenia don’t have these same variants. Everybody’s got something, but not everybody’s got the same thing.

So what do we do now?

The answer, we’re learning, might not be found in the brain’s genes, but in how the brain develops. Protecting a genetically vulnerable brain from developing mental illness — making it more resilient before birth, if possible — is the new holy grail for this generation of brain researchers. Thanks to work…