Life-span Evolution of the Capabilities of Rhesus Monkeys

描述(由申请者提供)：有相当大的兴趣了解早期生活条件和随后的生活环境在决定成人年龄、健康、社会经济结果、个性和认知方面所起的作用。同样令人感兴趣的是了解个性和认知对健康、老龄化和社会经济结果的影响。人们还非常有兴趣了解这些领域可能的补偿、补救和复原力途径。植根于生物、心理和环境的人类发展机制对于制定促进健康、减少不平等和发展人类潜力的政策至关重要。对这些机制的适当研究需要关于基因、环境和生物学的详细的生命周期信息。当研究几代人时，人们可以更好地研究家庭影响的影响，以及环境在改善或加剧最初天赋方面的作用。即使对一代人之内的人类进行研究，必要的数据也是稀缺的；代际数据更是支离破碎。对人类的实验证据也是有限的。恒河猴在基因和社会上都与人类相似。已经收集了关于恒河猴及其环境、世代之间和跨代的丰富数据，这些数据将用于这个项目。此外，该项目将从各种干预措施中产生新的数据。有了这些数据，就有可能研究恒河猴能力的演变，并检查剥夺和补救在生命周期发育中的作用。在动物权利协议规定的范围内，该项目将设计不利的早期和青少年环境。该项目将利用在恒河猴生命周期的五个间隔内对猴子进行采样的多种生物学(健康)、认知和个性指标，并对这些数据进行各种环境干预分析，以揭示新的经验关系，以及对接近人类的动物物种能力的起源和发展有更深层次的生物学理解。利用这些数据，将使用尖端方法对这些恒河猴种群进行针对人类种群开发的基因分析。该项目将分析社会因素如何在动态环境中调节基因表达，特别是哪些基因集对社会影响敏感，这些影响如何转化到细胞的分子环境中，以及固有的遗传特征可能如何调节社会环境影响。这些数据将使用生命周期技能形成的动态计量经济学模型进行分析，该模型将指导制定对人类的政策分析。对恒河猴的分析将作为研究人类发展的可能的原型。 公共卫生相关性：这项建议寻求支持，以调查健康和其他社会和经济结果的不平等的根源以及缓解不平等的机制。目前关于人类种群不平等的研究缺乏坚实的生物学和实验基础，但恒河猴与人类大约95%的基因相同，并且在几个与情绪调节相关的基因上具有类似的功能多态。由于这些相似性，该项目可以利用对恒河猴种群的实验研究来调查不平等的根源、培养对逆境的韧性的机制，以及补偿或补救逆境的干预措施的有效性。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): There is substantial interest in understanding the role that early life conditions and subsequent life environments play in determining: adult aging, health, socioeconomic outcomes, personality and cognition. Also of interest is understanding the effects that personality and cognition have on health, aging and socioeconomic outcomes. There is also great interest in understanding possible avenues of compensation, remediation and resilience in these areas. Mechanisms of human development rooted in biology, psychology and the environment are essential to designing policies that promote health, reduce inequality, and develop human potential. A proper study of these mechanisms requires detailed life cycle information on genes, environments and biology. When examined across generations, one can better examine the effects of family influence, and the role of environments in ameliorating or exacerbating initial endowments. Even for a study of humans within a generation, the requisite data are scarce; intergenerational data are even more fragmentary. Experimental evidence for humans is also limited. Rhesus monkeys are genetically and socially similar to humans. Rich data has been collected on rhesus monkeys and their environments, between and across generations, which will be used for this project. Furthermore, this project will generate new data from a variety of interventions. With these data, it is possible to study the evolution of rhesus capabilities and to examine the role of deprivation and remediation in life cycle development. Within limits dictated by animal rights protocols, this project will engineer adverse early and adolescent environments. The project will utilize numerous measures of biology (health), cognition and personality for monkeys sampled over five intervals of the rhesus life cycles and performs a variety of environmental interventions Analyses of these data will reveal new empirical relationships and a deeper, biologically-based understanding of the origins and development of capabilities in an animal species close to humans. Cutting-edge methodology will be used with this data to conduct gene analysis developed for human populations on these rhesus monkey populations. The project will analyze how social factors regulate gene expression in a dynamic setting and in particular which sets of genes are sensitive to social influences, how these influences are transduced into the molecular environment of the cell, and how inherent genetic characteristics might modulate socio-environmental influences. These data will be analyzed using a dynamic econometric model of life cycle skill formation that will guide the formulation of policy analysis for humans. An analysis of rhesus monkeys will serve as a prototype for what is possible in the study of human development. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: This proposal seeks support to investigate the origins of inequality in health and other social and economic outcomes and mechanisms to alleviate inequality. Current studies of inequality in human populations lack firm biological and experimental grounding, but rhesus monkeys share approximately 95% of their genes with humans and possess functionally similar polymorphisms in several genes linked to emotional regulation. Because of these similarities, this project can use experimental research on rhesus monkey populations to investigate the origins of inequality, the mechanisms that foster resilience to adversity, and the efficacy of interventions that compensate or remediate adversity.