The Ghost In Your Genes - 12 基因外遗传现象

Olov Bygren was looking to see if poor nutrition had an effect on health when he stumbled on something curious. It appeared that a famine could affect people almost 100 years later even if they never suffered a famine themselves. He wanted to know how this might be possible? So he asked Markus Pembrey.

Olov first reported that the food supply of the ancestors was affecting the longevity¹ or, or mortality rate of the grandchildren. Em, so I was very excited. I responded immediately.

Pembrey had a hunch² that the incidence of one disease----diabetes³, might be an indicator⁴ that epigenetics was involved.

Specifically I wanted to know the results of the diabetes because this was the one that I thought might involve the imprinting⁵.

So Olov trod the records for any death due to diabetes and then looked back to see if there was anything unusual about the diet of their grandparents.

Er, a few months later, he e-mailed me to say that indeed they had shown a strong association, er, between the, er, em, food supply of the father's father, and the chance of diabetes being mentioned on the death certificate of the grandchild. Er, so of course I was really rather excited about that because it really did look as if there was some trans-generational effect going on there.

It looked as if there were clear links through the generations between grandparents and grandchildren. They found that the life expectancy⁶ of grandchildren was being directly affected⁷ by the diet of the grandparent. It appeared that Overkalix held the key to finding the first evidence of epigenetic inheritance in humans.

It really did look as if there were some new mechanism⁸ transmitting environmental exposure information from one generation to the next.

Because these ideas were so heretical, Pembrey knew that the results could be dismissed as nothing more than a curiosity. They needed to get an understanding of how this was happening. How could the grandparent capture the information that was affecting the grandchildren?

We wanted to tease out when you could trigger in the ancestor a trans-generational response.

So he and Bygren went back to the data and looked again. The more they looked, the more patterns started to appear.

We were able to look at the food supply every year in the grandfather and the grandmother from the moment they were conceived right through into the age of 20. We found that there're only certain periods in the ancestor's development when they can trigger this trans-generational response. They're, what one might call, sensitive periods of development.

New Words & Phrases:

longevity : Longevity is long life. 寿命, 长寿

heretical: A belief or action that is heretical is one that most people think is wrong because it disagrees with beliefs that are generally accepted. 异教的;异端的

1 longevity   

n.长命；长寿

参考例句：

• Good habits promote longevity.良好的习惯能增长寿命。
• Human longevity runs in families.人类的长寿具有家族遗传性。

2 hunch   

n.预感，直觉

参考例句：

• I have a hunch that he didn't really want to go.我有这么一种感觉，他并不真正想去。
• I had a hunch that Susan and I would work well together.我有预感和苏珊共事会很融洽。

3 diabetes   

n.糖尿病

参考例句：

• In case of diabetes, physicians advise against the use of sugar.对于糖尿病患者，医生告诫他们不要吃糖。
• Diabetes is caused by a fault in the insulin production of the body.糖尿病是由体內胰岛素分泌失调引起的。

4 indicator   

n.指标；指示物，指示者；指示器

参考例句：

• Gold prices are often seen as an indicator of inflation.黃金价格常常被看作是通货膨胀的指标。
• His left-hand indicator is flashing.他左手边的转向灯正在闪亮。

5 imprinting   

n.胚教，铭记（动物生命早期即起作用的一种学习机能）；印记

参考例句：

• He gathered her to himself, imprinting kisses upon her lips and cheeks. 他把她抱过来，吻着她的嘴唇和面颊。 来自辞典例句
• It'seems likely that imprinting is an extreme case of conditioning. 看来似乎铭记是适应的一种极端的情况。 来自辞典例句

6 expectancy   

n.期望，预期，（根据概率统计求得）预期数额

参考例句：

• Japanese people have a very high life expectancy.日本人的平均寿命非常长。
• The atomosphere of tense expectancy sobered everyone.这种期望的紧张气氛使每个人变得严肃起来。

7 affected   

adj.不自然的，假装的

参考例句：

• She showed an affected interest in our subject.她假装对我们的课题感到兴趣。
• His manners are affected.他的态度不自然。

8 mechanism   

n.机械装置；机构，结构

参考例句：

• The bones and muscles are parts of the mechanism of the body.骨骼和肌肉是人体的组成部件。
• The mechanism of the machine is very complicated.这台机器的结构是非常复杂的。