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P2 Speech Gene Shows Its Bossy Nature - NYTimes.com

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November 12, 2009

Speech Gene Show s Its Bossy Nature

By NICHOLAS WADE

Of the 20,000 genes in the human genome, few are more fascinating than FOXP2, a gene that underlies

he faculty of human speech.

All animals have an FOXP2 gene, but the human versions product differs at just 2 of its 740 units from

hat of chimpanzees, suggesting that this tiny evolutionary fix may hold the key to why people can speak

and chimps cannot.

FOXP2 came to light in a large London family, half of whose members have severe problems in articulat

and understanding speech. All turned out to have a mutation that disrupted this vital gene.

This year, one inquiry bore fruit, although of a somewhat ambiguous nature, when biologists in Leipzig,

Germany, genetically engineered a mouse with the human version of FOXP2 substituted for its own. Th

upgraded mice squeaked somewhat differently from plain mice and were born with subtle alterations in

brain structure. But mice and people are rather distant cousins their last common ancestor lived som

million years ago and the human version of FOXP2 evidently was not able to exert a transformative e

on the mouse.

A scientific team led by Dr. Daniel H. Geschwind of the University of California, Los Angeles, has now

ompleted a parallel experiment, which is to put the chimp version of FOXP2 into human neurons and s

what happens. These were neurons living in laboratory glassware, not a human brain, so they gave a

napshot of FOXP2 only at the cellular level. But they confirmed suspicions that FOXP2 was a maestro o

he genome.

The gene does not do a single thing but rather controls the activity of at least 116 other genes, Dr.

Geschwinds team says in the Thursday issue of Nature.

Like the conductor of an orchestra, the gene quiets the activity of some and summons a crescendo from

others. Surprisingly, the chimp version of the gene had a more forceful effect in the human nerve cells th

did the human version.

The human FOXP2 seems to be acting on a more refined set of genes, Dr. Geschwind said in an interv

rom London.

Several of the genes under FOXP2s thumb show signs of having faced recent evolutionary pressure,

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8/14/2019 FOXP2 Speech Gene Shows Its Bossy Nature - NYTimes

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P2 Speech Gene Shows Its Bossy Nature - NYTimes.com

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meaning they were favored by natural selection. This suggests that the whole network of genes has evolv

ogether in making language and speech a human faculty.

And some of the genes in FOXP2s network have already been implicated in diseases that include disord

of speech, confirming its importance in these faculties.

But the FOXP2 network is certainly not the only set of genes involved in language. For one thing, FOXP

qually active on both sides of the human brain, whereas the language faculty is asymmetric, Dr.Geschwind said.

By studying the other genes in the FOXP2 network, Dr. Geschwind said, he hoped to use FOXP2 as a lev

o get a view of the molecular machinery in a biological language circuit.

n a commentary on the new finding, Martin Dominguez and Dr. Pasko Rakic of Yale describe it as an

mportant discovery that provides a starting point for future studies of the molecular basis of language

human evolution.

Copyright 2009The New York Times Company

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