By Donna Jackson Nakazawa
Adversity in childhood can create long-lasting scars, damaging our cells and our DNA, and making us sick as adults
Read on aeon.co
CLEAR ALL
If you’ve ever wondered why you’ve been struggling a little too hard for a little too long with chronic emotional and physical health conditions that just won’t abate, or feeling as if you’ve been swimming against some invisible current that never ceases, a new field of scientific research...
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Most genetic studies completely ignore the science of epigenetics, which is how the environment actually turns certain genes on or off.
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Science proves how important your thoughts and beliefs are when it comes to your physical health.
For all the hype, fear and misinformation that surrounds the application of gene editing, there is an equally powerful technology that offers much the same in potential benefit. This technology, epigenetics, is a natural process that has gone largely unremarked by consumers.
Scientific research shows that experiences can affect whether and how genes are expressed. Nature vs. Nurture is no longer a debate—it's nearly always both!
If your DNA is the unique 'song of you', your epigenomes are the audio engineers that decide how that music will be played — which bits are loud, or edited out, whether the melody is dominant or maybe the drums are lost altogether.
Epigenetics is the study of biological mechanisms that will switch genes on and off, to be put as a simplified definition. What does that mean? Well, if you are new to this whole thing, we first need a quick crash course in biochemistry and genetics before learning exactly what is epigenetics.
It’s not uncommon to read headlines about the “epigenetic revolution” and hear claims that epigenetics overthrows our understanding of evolution. So what exactly is epigenetics? How does it work? And why does it matter?
Studying twins has long offered insight into the interplay of nature and nurture. Epigenetics is the next frontier.
Scientists are turning their focus to an emerging field: epigenetics, the study of how people’s experience and environment affect the function of their genes.