Methylation, though, “tags” DNA molecules in ways that can turn them on or off. Heritable changes in gene expression were long thought to be exclusively the result of a change in the underlying DNA sequence, as when genotypes combine during sexual reproduction. Like everything in it’s not nature or nurture, it’s both.”ĭNA methylation mechanism that alters the function and expression of a gene. We just know they’re there and have the potential to affect expression. We don’t know exactly how those changes alter the gene expression. How those changes in methylation patterns manifest as physical health conditions has yet to be established. Washington State University associate professor of nursing Lonnie Nelson says that “Stressors experienced by parents around the period of conception and during pregnancy do have an effect on DNA methylation patterns that get expressed in the offspring. While hotly debated among social scientists and medical researchers, there is growing evidence that the trauma of one generation may indeed negatively impact later generations. The transgenerational effects are not only psychological, but familial, social, cultural, neurobiological and possibly even genetic as well, the researchers say.” Researchers, according to an article in the American Psychological Association Monitor, “are exploring the intergenerational effects of the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge killings in Cambodia, the Rwandan genocide, the displacement of American Indians and the enslavement of African-Americans. Black Americans, too, suffered through geographical dislocation when their ancestors were transported from their homelands to work on plantations in the Americas, as well as relentless oppression through racism and American apartheid. Contemporary Native Americans are the offspring of survivors of a concerted effort at genocide, both physical and cultural, through the Indian Wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the boarding school system that stripped Indigenous North Americans of their cultural knowledge, including their languages and medicine ways. Jews, homosexuals, and others experienced brutal persecution during World War Two. Medical researchers are beginning to ask a question: Can the effects of a trauma experienced by one generation somehow be passed on to subsequent generations? Could the deeply traumatizing experience of surviving, for example, genocide or severe malnutrition negatively impact the health of subsequent generations of survivors’ children?
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