Scientists found that those who had been in utero during the famine were a few pounds heavier than average. Pregnant women were particularly vulnerable, and the famine impacted the unborn children for the rest of their lives. When the Dutch were liberated in May 1945, more than 20,000 had died of starvation. Mason shared that the field of epigenetics gained real traction about a decade ago, when scientists published seminal research on the Dutch Hunger Winter, an extended period of famine that took place towards the end of World War II when the Nazis blocked food supplies in October 1944, thrusting much of the Netherlands into famine. How Extreme Situations Have Impacted Offspring Here’s a look at what scientists have learned from both case studies and experiments. There has also been a lot of work in the lab focused on this phenomenon, and that work really accelerated after The Human Genome Project (HGP) was completed in 2003. So, What Exactly Are These Epigenetic Studies?ĭifferences among groups who had gone through extreme physical and psychological stress, like Holocaust survivors, those who were born to parents who lived through “The Dutch Hunger Winter,” and sons of Confederate prisoner-of-war soldiers in the American Civil War, all make the case the most clearly, but they’re not the whole picture. Animal and some smaller human studies have shown that exposure to stressors like immense stress or cold can trigger metabolic changes in subsequent generations. Today the idea that a person’s experience could alter their biology, and behavior of their children and grandchildren, has gained serious traction. What would have seemed preposterous 20 years ago has become a fast-emerging field of study.

What does that mean? In essence: epigenetics control how or why your genes are expressed.” He shared that “epigenetics, in simplified terms, is the study of the biological control mechanisms of DNA-the light switches that turn genes on or off. Chris Mason, associate professor at Weill Cornell Medicine, with appointments at the Tri-Institutional Program in Computational Biology and Medicine between Cornell, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Rockefeller University, and director of the Mason Lab. This alteration is not genetic, but epigenetic. This mark doesn’t cause a genetic mutation, but it does alter the mechanism by which the gene is expressed. Here’s how: Trauma can leave a chemical mark on a person’s genes, which can then be passed down to future generations.

Intergenerational transmission trauma