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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 of what inheritance is, if you can't in life, in ordinary development and living, separate out the gene from the environmental effect that are so intertwined.
Pembrey and Bygren's work showed clearly that what our grandparents ate could affect our health. Increasingly, it appeared as if all sorts of environmental events were capable of affecting the genes. And in Washington state, Mike Skinner stumbled on some results with profound implications. He triggered an effect with commonly used pesticides and fungicides. He exposed a pregnant rat with the high dose of one of these pesticides, and then looked for effects in her offspring.
And so I treated the animals, the pregnant mother, with these compounds, and then we started seeing between six months to a year, a whole host of other diseases that we didn't expect. And this ranged between tumors, such as breast and skin tumors, prostate disease, er, kidney disease, er, and immune dysfunction.
He bred these rats to see if the effects persisted into subsequent generations.
The next step was for us to go to the next generation and go to the third generation. All and the same disease still occurred. So after we did several repeats and got the third generation showing it, then a fourth generation, we thought back and realized that the phenomenon was real. We started seeing these major diseases occur in approximately 85 percent of all the animals of every single generation.
His discoveries were a revelation.
We knew that if an individual was exposed to an environmental toxin that they can get a disease they potential. The new phenomenon is that the environmental toxin no longer affects just the individual exposed, but through two or three generations down the line. I knew that epigenetics existed. I knew that it was a controlling factor for DNA activity whether the genes are silenced or not. Um, but to say that epigenetics would have a major role in disease development, so I'd had no concept for that. The fact that this could have a such huge impact and could explain a whole host of things we couldn't explain before, took a while to actually sink in.
The exposure of a single animal to a toxin was causing a whole range of diseases in almost every individual of the following generations. And because epigenetic effects have been observed in humans, this may have implications for us too.
Er, what this means then is what your grandmother was exposed to when she was pregnant could cause a disease in you, even though you didn't have an exposure, and you are gonna pass it onto your great grandchildren.
New Words & Phrases:
intertwine: If two or more things are intertwined or intertwine, they are closely connected with each other in many ways. 纠缠;编结
fungicide: A fungicide is a chemical that can be used to kill fungus or to prevent it from growing. 杀真菌剂
prostate : The prostate or the prostate gland is an organ in the body of male mammals which is situated at the neck of the bladder and produces a liquid which forms part of semen. 【解】前列腺(的)
sink in: When a statement or fact sinks in, you finally understand or realize it fully. 被理解;被理会;被听进去
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