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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 longevity or, or mortality rate of the grandchildren. Em, so I was very excited. I responded immediately.
Pembrey had a hunch that the incidence of one disease----diabetes, might be an indicator 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 imprinting.
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 expectancy of grandchildren was being directly affected 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 mechanism 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
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