Your health may be determined by stresses experienced by your great-grandparents. How does this change how we plan for the future?
...In the last two years alone, scientists around the world have begun to look to epigenetic inheritance to explain a growing series of epidemics: rising rates of obesity, ADD, heart disease, depression, stress response syndromes, diabetes, autism, and schizophrenia. The list goes on. Epidemiologists point to stress—from the personal stress of living in a refugee camp or in New York City on September 11, 2001, to the chemical stresses of the plastics revolution, to the nutritional stress of chronic poor nutrition—as potential triggers for otherwise unexplained epidemics in public health.
These discoveries about genetics and inheritance challenge the most basic ideas about when life starts, why life ends, and what our responsibilities are to our children, our grandchildren, and our community. In just two decades epigenetics has radicalized how scientists think about chronic disease and the origins of health. But social understanding, public policy, and actual day-to-day medical practice may be decades away from shifting in any meaningful way. The fastest-moving field in all of medicine may be moving faster than the pace of our ethical, legal, medical, and imaginative faculties.
[For more of this story, written by Caitlin Baggott, go to http://oregonhumanities.org/ma...ore-you-know-it/749/]
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