The work of these scientists is at last throwing a spotlight onto the mysterious hidden world of epigenetics. They appear to show that the lives of our ancestors have a capacity to affect us directly....
The impact of a famine being captured by the genes in the eggs and sperm, and a memory of this event was being carried forward to affect the grandchildren, generations later. We are changing the view...
They discovered that when a famine was able to trigger an effect was different for the grandmother than the grandfather. The grandmother appeared susceptible while she herself was still in the womb, w...
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...
But could this effect be transmitted to their offspring? They found nearly 200 women of whom a number had actually been in the Twin Towers. About half of them developed post-traumatic stress disorder....
Our studies had really convinced me that it were the later experiences of the child as the child was growing up bombarded with years and years of, em, symptoms from the parents that accounted for the...
The email was sent by Olov Bygren. He was studying the population records of an obscure town in northern Sweden, Overkalix. What made these records unique was their detail. They recorded births and de...
No body had had seen this kind of thing before, so this was the first time and all the people looking at the gel and saying "No, this can't be right and that's the wrong gel ", you know, how you get e...
After we had seen how relatively easy it was to change the switches in mouse embryos, we thought that perhaps the same could be true of human embryos. In IVF, you also have the embryo for a brief peri...
If inheritance was not just about DNA, if these gene switches were so important, just what could turn them on or off? Stephanie and Emend Mullins have two children, Karen and Charlotte. When we were t...
It showed that there was clearly more to inheritance than simply the coded sequence of DNA. We then realized that we were dealing with what is now known as genomic imprinting. What genomic imprinting...
...lead to the end of diseases like cancer... Alzheimer's , Parkinson's , diabetes. The list is endless. We were thinking of genes in a very mechanical way. We were thinking of them just in terms of t...
Named after Henry Angelman, the pediatrician who first described Angelman syndrome. He referred to them as happy puppet children because it described, to some extent, the features. They have a rather...
Marcus Pembrey is one of a select band of scientists, a band of scientists who are daring to challenge an orthodoxy . They believe the lives of our parents, grandparents, and even our great grandparen...
We are on the brink of uncovering a hidden world, a world that connects past and future generations in ways we never imagined possible. What this means is an environmental exposure that your grandmoth...
