Research: Neurodevelopmental and psychosocial risk factors in serial killers and mass

Aggression and Violent Behavior, May–June 2014

A Neuroscientist Uncovers A Dark Secret
June 29, 2010

“The criminal brain has always held a fascination for James Fallon. For nearly 20 years, the neuroscientist at the University of California-Irvine has studied the brains of psychopaths. He studies the biological basis for behavior, and one of his specialties is to try to figure out how a killer's brain differs from yours and mine.

About four years ago, Fallon made a startling discovery. It happened during a conversation with his then 88-year-old mother, Jenny, at a family barbecue.

"I said, 'Jim, why don't you find out about your father's relatives?' " Jenny Fallon recalls. "I think there were some cuckoos back there."

Fallon investigated.

"There's a whole lineage of very violent people -- killers," he says.

One of his direct great-grandfathers, Thomas Cornell, was hanged in 1667 for murdering his mother. That line of Cornells produced seven other alleged murderers, including Lizzy Borden. "Cousin Lizzy," as Fallon wryly calls her, was accused (and controversially acquitted) of killing her father and stepmother with an ax in Fall River, Mass., in 1882.”

Snip

“After learning his violent family history, he examined the images and compared them with the brains of psychopaths. His wife's scan was normal. His mother: normal. His siblings: normal. His children: normal.

"And I took a look at my own PET scan and saw something disturbing that I did not talk about," he says.

What he didn't want to reveal was that his orbital cortex looks inactive.

"If you look at the PET scan, I look just like one of those killers."”

Snip

“Fallon calls up another slide on his computer. It has a list of family members' names, and next to them, the results of the genotyping. Everyone in his family has the low-aggression variant of the MAO-A gene, except for one person.

"You see that? I'm 100 percent. I have the pattern, the risky pattern," he says, then pauses. "In a sense, I'm a born killer."”

—-


Can Your Genes Make You Kill?
“To save his life, his legal team took an unusual approach, never before admitted in a capital-murder case. They sent a sample of Waldroup’s blood to the molecular genetics lab at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Lab techs there were told to look at a specific gene. Sure enough, they found Waldroup had a genetic variant on his X chromosome, one that coded the enzyme monoamine oxidase-A (MAOA).”

Snip

“Partly for this reason, the study of behavioural genetics remains a controversial topic, with disagreement not just over the science itself, but even more so about the therapeutic, societal and legal implications.

Too much might have been made too soon of early findings that made correlations between alleles of certain genes and tendencies to antisocial or criminal behaviour. Indeed, most researchers in the field were appalled by the decision of an Italian appeal court in 2009 to cut the sentence of a convicted murderer by one year on the grounds that he had a version of the MAOA gene, which has been linked to aggression and violence (Feresin, 2009). There is equal dismay over some US courts that went the other way and accepted genetic factors as evidence for the prosecution, leading to higher sentences on the basis that people with particular alleles cannot be cured and will remain a risk to society for longer.

“Taking genetic factors into account when sentencing is plain stupid, unless we are talking about something like Down's syndrome or some other syndrome that drastically reduces intelligence and executive functioning,” insisted Anthony Walsh from the Criminal Justice Department at Boise State University in Idaho, USA. “This is the kind of “genetic determinism” that liberals have worried themselves silly over. They just have to take one or two neuroscience and genetic classes to dispense with their ‘my genes/neurons' made me do it. Nothing relieves one of the obligation to behave civilized.””

EMBO Reports
The European Molecular Biology Organization
The psycho gene
Philip Hunter
The psycho gene

( @Charlot123 )

Cool. I shall comment on it later