Also at Pacific Standard:Epigenetics is a hot field right now, and while many recent findings aren’t nearly as revolutionary as its practitioners believe, we have seen some provocative study results that are hard to dismiss.•You inherit some of your grandmother’s genes, but do you also inherit her experiences? Last month, a group of Swedish researchers at the Karolinska Institute and the University of Umeå released their latest in a series of reports on a long-term health study of people born between 1890 and 1920 in Överkalix, a small town in northern Sweden. These scientists have been making waves for more than a decade with claims that our health is influenced by the experiences of our grandparents. Using statistics of 19th-century harvests in Northern Sweden to determine how much food was available to the ancestors of the residents of Överkalix, the researchers concluded that the risk for cardiovascular disease among their study participants was influenced by the dramatic swings from feast to famine experienced by the participants’ grandparents during childhood.
Studies like this one are part of the hodgepodge of research that gets lumped together in the growing and increasingly ill-defined field of epigenetics. Scientific interest in this field has boomed over the past decade, thanks in part to technological advances that make new types of experiments possible. Epigenetics is hot in the popular press as well. It made the cover of Time in 2010. In Germany, Der Spiegel declared that epigenetics is a “victory over the gene,” illustrating both the victory itself and the sexiness of the science with an image of naked woman emerging from the confines of her gene pool. And of course, epigenetics is touted as the new secret to curing cancer. But the popularity of epigenetics is misplaced: It’s a badly over-hyped field whose recent findings aren’t nearly as revolutionary as many of its practitioners believe....MORE
Is It Possible to Degrade and Exploit Your At-Home Sexbot?
