Are there viruses that can make us smarter?

 Years ago, I came across research pointing to aspartic acid as something that can make us smarter:

D-Aspartic acid (D-Asp) is an endogenous amino acid present in neuroendocrine systems. Here, we report evidence that D-Asp in the rat is involved in learning and memory processes. Oral administration of sodium D-aspartate (40 mM) for 12-16 days improved the rats' cognitive capability to find a hidden platform in the Morris water maze system....Moreover, 20 randomly selected rats possessing relatively high endogenous concentrations of D-Asp in the hippocampus were much faster in reaching the hidden platform, an event suggesting that their enhanced cognitive capability was functionally related to the high levels of D-Asp.  

Topo E, Soricelli A, Di Maio A, D'Aniello E, Di Fiore MM, D'Aniello A. Evidence for the involvement of D-aspartic acid in learning and memory of rat. Amino Acids. 2010 May;38(5):1561-9. doi: 10.1007/s00726-009-0369-x. Epub 2009 Nov 5. PMID: 19890700. Online at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19890700/

It turns out that picornaviruses can enhance production of aspartic acid:

Foot-and-mouth disease, a class of animal diseases, is caused by foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV). The metabolic changes during FMDV infection remain unclear....A total of 284 metabolites in cells were significantly changed after FMDV infection, and most of them belong to amino acids and nucleotides. Further studies showed that FMDV infection significantly enhanced aspartate in vitro and in vivo. The amino acid transporter solute carrier family 38 member 8 (SLC38A8) was responsible for FMDV-upregulated aspartate....Foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV), an Aphthovirus within the viral family Picornaviridae, is a single-stranded positive-sense RNA virus that causes foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) in domestic and wild cloven-hoofed animals worldwide, including swine, goats, sheep, cattle, deer, and camelids.

Liu H, Zhu Z, Xue Q, Yang F, Cao W, Xue Z, Liu X, Zheng H. Picornavirus infection enhances aspartate by the SLC38A8 transporter to promote viral replication. PLoS Pathog. 2023 Feb 3;19(2):e1011126. doi: 10.1371/journal.ppat.1011126. PMID: 36735752; PMCID: PMC9931120. Online at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9931120/ 

What if we could inoculate babies with picornaviruses or other viruses that increase aspartate--viruses that don't cause any bad or obvious symptoms but which do increase the level of aspartic acid they have in their brains? Would we increase their intelligence over the course of their developmental years? It's such an intriguing thought.

I realized this use of a virus could be a real possibility because of the unusual requirement in some forms of circumcision that there be at least a drop of blood drawn during the circumcision and that another human must draw the blood out by contact with the circumciser's oral mucosa (look up the controversies over mohels in Jewish brit milah for more details). If herpes has been spread via this practice, which is alleged to be the case, then perhaps asymptomatic viruses have been spread by mohels over the millennia. 

Wouldn't it be interesting if some of Jewish culture and history has been shaped by the spread of unnoticed viruses via certain mohels? (And, as a female who watched Yentl, I have to wonder how young females would get left out of any benefits provided by such viruses.)