The Ghost in Your Genes

[apple0154]

(Excerpt) At the heart of this new field is a simple but contentious idea -- that genes have a 'memory'. That the lives of your grandparents -- the air they breathed, the food they ate, even the things they saw -- can directly affect you, decades later, despite your never experiencing these things yourself. And that what you do in your lifetime could in turn affect your grandchildren. (End)

Also, a defective gene can cause a different disease depending from which parent it was received. For example, if gene “123” causes disease “A” they know it was inherited from the mother and if it causes disease “B” they know it was inherited from the father even though the gene has the identical defect.

Furthermore, let’s say a person is exposed to a cancer-causing toxin. That gene is switched off and passed on to the children and then on to their children resulting in the grandchildren having a greater rate of cancer due to the toxin their grandfather was exposed to.

That reminds me of the Biblical warning that the “sins” of the father are passed on to the children and on to their children. “Sin” being something bad that happened to the father, not necessarily something the father actually did.

Fascinating stuff! It’s called Epigenetics.

[cancel2 2022]

(Excerpt) At the heart of this new field is a simple but contentious idea -- that genes have a 'memory'. That the lives of your grandparents -- the air they breathed, the food they ate, even the things they saw -- can directly affect you, decades later, despite your never experiencing these things yourself. And that what you do in your lifetime could in turn affect your grandchildren. (End)

Also, a defective gene can cause a different disease depending from which parent it was received. For example, if gene “123” causes disease “A” they know it was inherited from the mother and if it causes disease “B” they know it was inherited from the father even though the gene has the identical defect.

Furthermore, let’s say a person is exposed to a cancer-causing toxin. That gene is switched off and passed on to the children and then on to their children resulting in the grandchildren having a greater rate of cancer due to the toxin their grandfather was exposed to.

That reminds me of the Biblical warning that the “sins” of the father are passed on to the children and on to their children. “Sin” being something bad that happened to the father, not necessarily something the father actually did.

Fascinating stuff! It’s called Epigenetics.

I saw this programme when it was broadcast, fascinating stuff.

[Mott the Hoople]

Epigenetics has been around for quite a while. I first learned about it in embryology class as it explains how an undifferentiated zygote can differentiate into the various tissue types like sarcomeres, nuerons, epithelium, endothelium, etc. It also explains how two individuals can carry the same allele but it's only expressed in one individual and not the other or how an expression can skip generations or how it can be triggered by environmental factors and cause future generations to be susceptible to those environmental factors.