A group of scientists have shown that monkeys procrastinate at doing work the same way that humans do, but they found a way to use gene therapy to temporarily eliminate the tendency to be lazy, thus turning the monkeys into hard workers. Pretty cool stuff with many far-reaching implications. Excerpts below taken from an article in Nature ("Gene therapy cures monkeys of laziness"), and there's another article at CNN ("Gene blocking turns monkeys into workaholics").

Procrastinating primates can be turned into workaholics, thanks to gene therapy. The discovery, which sheds light on the workings of the brain's reward centre, may further our understanding of mood disorders, such as depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Like many humans, monkeys tend to slack off when their goal is distant, then work harder as a deadline looms. But when a key gene is turned off, the primates work hard from the word go, researchers report in PNAS Online.

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The team injected a short strand of DNA into each monkey's brains, temporarily switching off a key gene in a region of the brain called the rhinal cortex, which is known to be involved in processing reward signals. ... With the gene turned off, the monkeys were unable to anticipate how many trials were left before the reward was given. They stopped procrastinating and worked hard throughout the task, making consistently fewer errors at every stage.

"The monkeys became extreme workaholics," says Richmond. "This was conspicuously out-of-character for these animals."