English Recordings

Beyond the boundaries of civilisation: Landmark study shows lab rats revert to survival mode within hours when set free. Is it the same for humans?
For more than 200 generations, they have not ventured outside. Yet a remarkable new experiment, which has tantalising implications for human behaviour, has discovered that laboratory-bred rats never forget how to survive in the wild.
Despite not knowing what the natural world looks, smells or even feels like, a group of rodents whose forebears have been kept in cages for the past 96 years showed that their ancient genetic impulses quickly surfaced.
Within hours of being freed, the rats started to return to their 'wild' ways, burrowing and following ancient mating instincts, behaviour which had never been possible when they were caged captives.
People have long thought that the trappings of civilisations could be quickly discarded when mammals were confronted with the necessities of survival.
But far from witnessing a Lord of the Flies -style reversion to a violent, cruel society, the rats formed more of a hierarchical order based on age, showing respect for the older animals and better organisational skills.
Dr Manuel Berdoy, a zoologist at Oxford University Veterinary Services, who put 75 rats into a farmyard and watched and filmed their reactions over six months, said that the results threw light on how our innate instincts work.
'The released rats quickly showed the ghost of their wild ancestors still lies beneath the wild coat of the lab rat, even after so many years of selective breeding [to favour more docile animals],' he said.
'Our rats found water, food and bolt holes almost immediately; within days they had started to establish social hierarchies, and within weeks they had a wide-ranging pattern of runs criss-crossing the colony.'
While Berdoy is wary of making too many links between species, he said: 'There are lots of similarities between rats and humans in that we are successful social omnivores. Certainly they had similar problems to resolve and some of them they resolved in a similar way.'
There could be no greater change of environment for a rat than the difference between the outdoors and a research laboratory. Lab rats are kept in plastic cages - normally with straw, maybe with cardboard tubes to hide in - that are cleaned out at least weekly. There is a constant supply of nutritionally balanced pellets for food, lighting is artificial and on timers, and the heating is controlled to within a few degrees.

'A lot of our members are outcasts,' Haselbauer told me. 'They were geeks at school, never had many friends, they weren't really good with women. Then they come on to the site and they open right up. All of a sudden they love this. They think, "No one's going to come in here and make fun of me."'
The IHIQS also has an online novel in progress, and debating contests in which each participant is assigned a topic such as nuclear power and then has to argue both for and against. But Haselbauer has much higher hopes for his society than such highbrow but meaningless pastimes.
'This is where it gets really wild,' he told me. 'We can harness all this intelligence to solve real problems.' In effect, he has created an unpaid international online think-tank, and he is figuring out how best to employ it. Some members have compiled a dossier extolling the virtues of free trade for developing countries, but there are also practical possibilities. 'I have a member who's in the US navy, and he pointed out that the navy spends hundreds of millions of dollars repainting their ships because the salt in the water strips the paint. But the salt charge is just a simple negative ion, and electricity emits positive ions, so maybe if we put a little electric charge through the ship it wouldn't rust. But this guy is not a scientist, so then we enlist the support of a PhD in material sciences who is also a member, and he puts together a team to solve the problem. It could make a lasting impact on the world.'
The day after he told me this, I visited Haselbauer in his midtown apartment and we sat by his computer as he monitored the forums. He spoke about recruiting more women members, and about a couple in Australia who met online during a trivia night and are getting married soon. He then showed me a few puzzles he had lined up for the next World's Smartest Person competition, due to launch in a few weeks.
'This is a sequential matrix,' he said, handing me a sheet of paper that looked like a tablecloth from a psychedelic nightclub. It wasn't even clear what the question was. 'Things are moving around,' he explained with glee. 'The Xs turn into triangles, and triangles turn into circles and the colours change over. Only about one in 400,000 people will get it. It's almost unsolvable!'

I met Nathan Haselbauer a few weeks ago over lobster bisque at a hip hotel in Manhattan, where he told me that he left Wall Street when his new hobby became all-consuming. 'Working for a corporation you can hit a ceiling,' he said, 'but with the IQ site I felt I could really make a difference. I wanted this to be the thing people remembered me by.' It was also important to him that the venture did not stagnate for another reason: he claimed he had spent $350,000 on its design and promotion.
Haselbauer wears his intelligence lightly. His conversation ranged over many topics, and none of them was Star Trek. He explained that the New York High IQ Society became the International High IQ Society when people started asking whether it was OK to join from abroad. Haselbauer claims a paid-up membership of 7,000, with 20,000 more who have passed one of the tests but have yet to hand over their credit card details. His software has also logged 360,000 unique visitors every month, one in three of whom takes one of the tests. Of these, 17 per cent pass, and 10-20 people sign up each day; 26 per cent of his members are women, and 80 per cent are 35 or younger.
I asked Haselbauer why, with all his smart members and all this internet traffic, he was still stuck with an unwieldy name like the IHIQS, rather than a snappy one like Mensa(Latin for table, symbolising 'a round table society where all members are equal'). He said many of his finest minds had been thinking about this for a long time.
I also asked him about the shades of elitism attached to high IQ societies, and he said that by lowering the entrance bar the IHIQS was less elitist than some, and anyway wasn't really elitist at all, 'although obviously there is some cachet involved in joining an exclusive club'. He believed that people would dismiss the notion that he was running a scam as soon as they joined, and he became unusually animated.
'Most of the other online IQ tests are absolute garbage,' he offered. 'They overinflate their scores because they're selling [character/intelligence] profiles. You're more likely to buy one of their profiles if they tell you you're a genius.'(I tried to gain entry to the IHIQS by deliberately filling in incorrect or guessed answers to the tests: I failed.) 'We decided to become the gold standard online,' Haselbauer continued. 'We have come up with questions that have never been done before. Most people do folding cubes, where you have to fold it up and say what shape it will make, but anyone can do that. I said, "Let's do a folding rhombic icosidodecahedron. Try folding that up!"'

That was three years ago. Then he did what most clever New Yorkers with money would do - he started an internet venture called the New York High IQ Society, which he ran from his bedroom in the evenings and weekends. The key to it was instant gratification: his experience with Mensa had inspired him to devise a series of online tests that would tell a person whether they were eligible to join his society within minutes of taking them. There were verbal and spatial puzzles, tests for those whose first language was not English, tests with no time limit and tests against the clock. Some were easy - one asked whether the word 'flounder' could be spelt using letters from the word 'wonderful' - and some would have you pulling your hair out.
The pass rate, which was also the qualification for membership, was set at an IQ score of 126 or above, which, in the arbitrary way of these things, was supposed to place you in the intelligence bracket of the top 5 per cent of the world's population. (This was considerably lower than the IQ target required to gain entry to Mensa, which would place you in the top 2 per cent.)
If you qualified for membership of the NYHIQS, you would be asked if you would like to part with a lifetime fee of $59.95. This would get you a password into the online members' area, a certificate and 10 per cent off any merchandise. For $20 more, you would also get a T-shirt, your certificate would be framed and merchandise would be 15 per cent less. For $500, you get all of the above plus a golf shirt, 25 per cent off other stuff, and your name inscribed on the benefactors' page.
Perhaps you are thinking: this is a scam. What a vanity project. How easy it would be to falsify the results and gratify the egos of the less intelligent on the way to fleecing them of their money. Or perhaps you are thinking: I wish I had thought of this first.

Mensa used to be the only place for bright sparks. Now a young New Yorker is challenging the old guard of the IQ world - and turning his mega-mind from puzzles to world peace.
You may not recognise the name Andrew Nierman, but he is the World's Smartest Person, a title bestowed upon him earlier this year by the International High IQ Society, after he correctly answered 22 out of 25 questions in the Haselbauer-Dickheiser Test for Exceptional Intelligence. Among the things he knew was the maximum number of one-inch diameter spheres that can be packed into a box 10 inches square and five inches deep. He also knew how many pieces a doughnut can be cut into using three simultaneous plane cuts, and he determined the breeding strategies of the Furble, both dominator and sharer types, while analysing their territorial habits and attitudes with particular regard to bravery and cautiousness.
Nierman is an American, and he was one question cleverer than Hakan Yilmaz from England and Carvin Toy from Canada, and four questions cleverer than Loh Zhi Jun from Singapore. Among the three questions he got wrong, two have never been answered correctly by anyone. One requires figuring out the length of the side of a shaded square nestling within a larger square of 21 other squares of various sizes (with no dimensions on any of them), and the other requires deciphering this cryptogram of a well-known phrase:
AFFDXVXAAAGXXDF
XXFGGAFAGGXFG
AAXAAXXFXXFFFGG
AFXGGVGGAFFAAFG
VGGAXFXGXXFFAAF
XDFFFAVFDXFDDXF
More than 60,000 people have taken a shot at this question online, but the only people who know the answer are the two friends - Nathan Haselbauer and Mike Dickheiser - who devised the test. (Any 'answers' that you may find online are, they say, incorrect.) Haselbauer, a 28-year-old New Yorker with a big smile but virtually no hair, used to earn a lot of money on Wall Street but found the work intellectually stultifying. After trading stock options for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, he wanted to discuss books or religion, but found that his colleagues preferred football or cars. He thought about joining Mensa, the best-known club for clever people seeking bright companions, and sent off for a home test. He passed and was invited to a supervised test, but by this time he was getting bored with the process.
'I thought, in the day of the internet, is this the most efficient way of doing things? All those delays and waiting around for results. I wanted to sign up for a high IQ society that wasn't like that, but then I looked around and there were none.'

In the end, the police accepted Buckland's innocence and on 21 November 1986, at Leicester Crown Court, he was cleared of the girls' murders. Thus the first use of DNA fingerprinting in a criminal case was to help free an innocent man. "I am pretty sure that, given his confession, Buckland would still be in jail today," adds Jeffreys. "Worse, the real perpetrator would have gone on to kill again."
In the end, that perpetrator was caught by a combination of DNA science and "good old-fashioned coppering", as Jeffreys puts it. In January 1987 police asked all local men between 17 and 34 to submit blood for DNA testing in order to eliminate them from their inquiries. By September, 4,000 had provided samples without success - until a chance remark transformed the investigation.
In a pub one day a local man admitted to his mates he had provided blood on behalf of a friend, Colin Pitchfork. One friend told the police, the man and Pitchfork were arrested and the latter's DNA was shown by Jeffreys to match that of the semen from the two girls' bodies. On 23 January 1988 Pitchfork was sentenced to life for the murders of Linda Mann and Dawn Ashworth. "It was the first time on the planet that a criminal investigation had been tackled and solved at a DNA level," says Jeffreys.
Since then, Jeffreys has used DNA profiling to determine a range of intriguing cases. In 1990 he showed that DNA from bones dug up from a Brazilian graveyard by Nazi-hunters was almost certainly that of Josef Mengele, a doctor who had tortured inmates at Auschwitz. A year later, he helped Home Office scientists prove that bones found in a burial pit in Ekaterinburg, 850 miles east of Moscow, were those of the Russian imperial family who had been killed in 1918 during the Russian civil war.
It is a striking body of work, which earned Jeffreys a knighthood in 1994 and which has taken him far from his academic roots and involved him in a startling range of work. He has no regrets, however: "I love it. DNA fingerprinting came out of the blue and turned me round in five minutes flat. There are certain things in science that are historically inevitable, however. I was just lucky that I got to discover DNA fingerprinting. If I hadn't, someone else would have done it by now. I have no illusions about that."

The next two years were "simply insane", adds Jeffreys. He was inundated with calls from families, mostly of Bangladeshi or Pakistani origins, who had been caught up in immigration disputes. "The university switchboard jammed on several occasions with the calls coming into us." A company, Cellmark, was set up in 1987 to take up these cases and took over much of the Jeffreys caseload.
"Then, out of the blue, I got a call from Leicestershire police, who were investigating the rape and murder of two schoolgirls, Linda Mann and Dawn Ashworth, who lived in the village of Narborough outside Leicester." A local man, Richard Buckland, had just confessed to the murder of Dawn but refused to confess to the killing of Linda. Use your DNA fingerprinting technology to prove he killed both girls, they asked him.
So Jeffreys set up his tests, using - in this case - a version of DNA fingerprinting called DNA profiling. Only a limited number of repeated regions are counted, a technique that is quicker to use and requires smaller samples. It was a perfect opportunity to show off the forensic value of genetic fingerprinting, Jeffreys realised, and, as the tests were being completed, he worked through the night to finish them off as quickly as he could. "I just couldn't wait any longer," he says.
He pulled the film from its developing tank. "I had expected to draw a blank and to find there was not enough DNA in the samples of semen that had been taken from the girls' bodies to produce results." He was wrong. The film was covered in black bands, which showed that the semen from both girls came from the same man, but that Buckland's DNA was completely different. He was not the murderer, the tests indicated. "It was a blood-chilling result," adds Jeffreys.
The police's response was terse and Anglo-Saxon. For his part, the geneticist began to worry that the whole concept of DNA profiling was "up the spout" and that there were things going on biologically that science still did not understand. Then the Home Office repeated the tests and produced the same results as Jeffreys. "I was fretting all the time, but they gave me strength," he adds.

Yet the criminal case uses of DNA fingerprinting were not the first to occupy Jeffreys and his team. Its usefulness in immigration cases grabbed immediate attention. A paper about DNA fingerprinting was written by Jeffreys and his team and was published in Nature in March 1985, triggering several newspaper reports. These were instantly followed up by a group of lawyers who were fighting the deportation of a young boy who, said the Home Office, was not the son of a British woman, as she claimed, and had no right to UK nationality.
"In fact, I had never seen the implications for immigration cases," admits Jeffreys. "It was my wife, Sue, who said DNA fingerprinting would make an incredible difference in disputes over nationality. And she was absolutely right."
After talks with the woman's lawyers, Jeffreys agreed to help. However, the case was complicated by the fact that the boy's father was no longer living in Britain and could not be contacted. "It was like a jigsaw with most of the bits missing," says Jeffreys.
Nevertheless he took samples from the mother, her three daughters and the disputed son. The results "blew me away", he recalls. "It was so incredibly simple. When I looked at the film we made of the DNA samples, I could see that every genetic character in the boy was either present in the woman or in his sisters. He was definitely her son."
The Home Office called in Jeffreys and, after a detailed explanation by him, agreed to drop the case. "Afterwards I went over to tell the mother what had happened, that DNA had done its job," says Jeffreys. "She had a bad time for the past two years and it was clearly affecting her health. But the look on her face when I told her, the relief - it was a magical moment. I realised then that we were on to something of real use. We had reached out and touched someone's life."
Over the next decade, DNA fingerprinting was used to test more than 18,000 immigrants who had been refused entry into the UK. Of these, more than 95% produced results that showed they were blood relatives of UK citizens and were therefore entitled to British citizenship - thanks to DNA fingerprinting.

First, cells were broken open and their DNA extracted. Then this DNA was attached to photographic films. Radioactive probes - which could identify the repeated sections of DNA - were added. Everything was then placed in a photographic developing tank and left over the weekend of 8-9 September. The results, Jeffreys hoped, would reveal ways that might help him study inherited diseases such as cystic fibrosis.
But when he entered his laboratory that Monday morning and removed the film from its tank, he found an odd array of blobs and lines. "My first reaction was 'God, what a mess.' Then I stared a bit longer - and the penny dropped." That piece of film showed a sequence of bars, each representing different numbers of DNA repeats in the various individuals and animals in the experiment.
Crucially, every individual in the sample had a different bar code and could be identified with precision. Jeffreys could even establish kinships: the bands of the DNA supplied by one of his technicians were a composite of her mother's and father's, for example. Even the animal samples showed that individuals could be identified this way. As Jeffreys put it: "It was an absolute Eureka moment. It was a blinding flash. In five golden minutes, my research career went whizzing off in a completely new direction. The last thing that had been on my mind was anything to do with identification or paternity suits. However, I would have been a complete idiot not to spot the applications."
He called his staff together and they began a brain-storming session to find uses for the technology they had stumbled on. Paternity cases were an obvious example, as was the identification of criminals. "But then we thought, how about crime scene samples. Could we get DNA from blood left behind after murders or robberies?"
Today this seems a silly question, attuned as we are to the marvels displayed in CSI Miami and the rest. But in 1984 no one knew how stable DNA was. For all Jeffreys knew, it could break apart rapidly after a cell had died, making crime scene sampling impossible.
"So I spent the next two days cutting myself and leaving blood marks round the laboratory. Then we tested those bloodstains and found that their DNA was intact." Thus the genetics laboratory of Jeffreys was not only the birthplace of DNA fingerprinting; it became the first setting for a DNA crime scene analysis.

Twenty-five years ago academic Alec Jeffreys stumbled on a remarkable discovery. The scientific breakthrough led to DNA fingerprinting - which has since trapped hundreds of killers, freed the innocent and revolutionised science and criminal justice.
On 10 September 1984, geneticist Alec Jeffreys wrote three words - "33 autorad off" - in his red desk diary. The phrase marked the completion of an experiment, set up that summer, to study how inherited illnesses pass through families. It failed completely.
Yet the project remains one of the most profoundly influential pieces of research ever carried out in a British laboratory, for it produced the world's first DNA fingerprint, a technology that has revolutionised crime scene investigations, led to the convictions of murderers and rapists, and transformed immigration disputes and paternity cases.
Twenty-five years ago the idea that scientists would one day be able to pinpoint an individual from the tiniest trace of their sweat or blood would have seemed laughable. Today we take it for granted. Along with the CCTV camera and the tapping of emails and phone calls, the DNA fingerprint has become part of a civic apparatus that can follow the movements of individuals with unprecedented accuracy.
Thanks to the research by Jeffreys, thousands of dangerous criminals have been caught and imprisoned and thousands of individuals unfairly denied UK citizenship have been allowed to settle in this country. At the same time, millions of individuals have had their profiles stored in databases in Britain, a serious threat to civil liberties according to some organisations and individuals, a point that is - partially - accepted by Jeffreys himself. More than any other modern scientific discovery, DNA fingerprinting raises crucial issues about balancing the use of technology to help society against an individual's right to privacy.
Such concerns were far from the mind of Alec Jeffreys, then a 34-year-old Leicester University genetics researcher, in the summer of 1984. At the time he was seeking ways to trace genes through family lineages and had hit on a fragment of DNA that was repeated on different chromosomes in the cells of men and women.
This genetic stutter could be unique to an individual, Jeffreys realised, and so he devised an experiment to see if he could count those repeats in different individuals and their relatives, as well as in animals such as seals, mice and monkeys.