A student lays sprawled across the floor, his legs propped on a chair in an effort to keep from passing out. Every time he braves the needle he finds himself enveloped in a sea of black, but his girlfriend sits in the waiting room, already given her share of precious genetic material.

“She had done it so I guess he had to also,” Ana Patricia Wagoner, a research assistant in genetics, said.

These students are participating in a joint research project between the University and Duke to learn how genetics affect memory. Wagoner and Greg Gibson, William Neal Reynolds Professor of life sciences, are collaborating with David Goldstein of Duke to test 1,000 people’s memory and collect their blood samples.

The goal of the project is to find the genetic factors linked to memory, like the genes that shape a person’s face or determine the color of their hair, according to Gibson. Memory can be a fluid concept difficult to understand because it is so individual to each person.

“Memory has a wide variation,” he said. “People have photographic memories and there are people that cannot remember their phone number.”

The exam explores many different kinds of memory, including visual and spatial, by using a touch screen computer in Talley Student Center. Kimberley Gobac, a senior in biological sciences, is a research assistant who administrates the tests a few times a week. Although she has only given a few of the exams because student turnout has remained low, she has noticed that people are initially intimidated by the test.

Gobac took the exam when she began working for the project and said she found it hard to concentrate on the computer screen at times. Not everyone finds it hard though, and Gobac said some student’s results have impressed her.

Wagoner has also been impressed by the results so far.

“I haven’t seen radical bad memory,” Wagoner said. “People may have trouble identifying words but could have good spatial memory – people have different strengths and weaknesses.”

The memory test takes from an hour to an hour and a half to complete, but even with the dimming of the computer screen the participant is not yet finished. Like the student laying across the floor with his feet in a chair, the testing cannot be complete without a sample of DNA to map the participant’s genome.

The blood samples allow the researchers to sequence genes and learn patterns, according to Gobac.

The samples are sent to Duke where scientists will find what different genetic variants are present. Once the genome scan is preformed, they can determine from the 3,000 places which sequence leads to good memory, Gibson said.

“The human genome project allows us to go past just the hundred candidate genes,” he said.

A study preformed in Switzerland and published in the October edition of Science had 351 young adult participants and found one new gene that determines where neurons connect.

“Reinforcement between neurons is important,” Gibson said. “Knowing what proteins are there could allow companies to make drugs to mimic performance. Another possibility is as people start aging they have genes for memory loss – there are important questions of human biology and like behaviors.”

The State-Duke study is involving a bigger sample in hopes of finding more genes responsible for memory. Wagoner pointed out that this is not the first study, but it is the biggest, which leads to more accurate conclusions.

Currently, the study has had about 600 volunteers — but only 200 from State.

The biggest problem researchers have noticed is the fear of students before taking the exam — they are afraid of what short comings they might discover, according to Wagoner.

“But we want those people,” Gibson said. “We want everyday people. And we don’t tell people their results.”

Another issue they have had to face is students who think that their information is going to be distributed to pharmaceutical companies or in some other fashion. But every study done at the University involving humans has to meet Institutional Research Board standards, and this study involves three levels of security. Wagoner points out that all personal information is separated from the DNA.

The study is concentrating on younger people because memory drops off after a certain age and one of the interests of the study are the genes that cause this to happen, according to Gibson.

“We are focused on association between gene and Alzheimer’s,” he said. “We are focused on things across the population, not an individual problem.”

In addition to a person’s ability to memorize straight facts with no help, an important part of genetic memory, is a person’s use of devices to help them remember. Memory is not only about rote memorization of facts and numbers, but the ability to put information into something the person understands.

The students who first took the test responded incredibly well to the memory challenges that guided them through the exam — so well that the researchers had to increase the challenges they faced. Many new levels are available to the students who can keep their brain power focused. The variability in the length of the test is determined by how many levels a person’s memory conquers, according to Gobac.

The genes these participants show will help researchers with three goals: develop drugs, identify the genes and discover what is involved in memory from a cell biology point of view.

The last thing for researchers to do is finish collecting data.

“The more you get the more power you have to find things,” Gibson said. “We will probably keep things going until next semester, and the study probably will not be published until the end of next year.”

After the study is finished the people with extremely good or bad memory may be contacted again for further study, according to Wagoner.

A warning does go out about the results — genetics is a science of factors, and genes do not always represent themselves the same way in different people. The researchers are looking for generalizations.

“I think that most people are hoping to get get a message, but genetics is not like that,” Wagoner said. “There are too many factors. There are companies that you can send a blood sample too and they come up with a diet — that is ridiculous.”

Gobac does identify the importance of the study beyond each individual person.

“It’s really helping out with research and future generations,” she said. “If we are on top of everything now we’re better off for the future.”