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In a dark room in Charlottesville, Virginia, a mouse swims in a small pool, searching for a place to rest. In 12 previous swims, with the help of visual cues and training from an experimenter, the mouse eventually tracked down a platform near the center of the pool. But just a day after its last swim, the animal is spending nearly as much time searching for the platform as it did on its first swim. The discombobulated mouse’s problem? It has no T cells.
“Mice without functional T cells do not perform cognitive tasks as well as wild-type mice do,” says the University of Virginia’s Jonathan Kipnis, who first demonstrated a link between the immune system and cognitive function in 2004 as a member of ...
