be necessary to identify or create behavioral measures of the functions the interventions are intended to improve. The issue of measure development is discussed in some detail in Chapter 4.

The research initiative will also depend on the availability of appropriate infrastructure. For instance, easy access to aged transgenic and naïve animals in the scientific research community is critical, as is the development of standardized behavioral testing paradigms for mice and rats. Emphasis in this latter area has traditionally been placed on attempting to develop behavioral protocols for mice and rats that can be related to human cognition. It is also worth considering ways to murinize behavioral testing paradigms for humans, that is, to use types of cognitive tests with aging humans that can tap specific functions that have also been studied in rodent models (for a recent example, see Kahana et al., 1999). These issues of interdisciplinary collaboration and infrastructure are discussed in more detail in Chapter 5.