Epigenetics - Something New!

This is how a new article begins from "The Scientist" due out tomorrow:

(http://www.the-scientist.com/yr2004/jul/feature_040705.html)
 
"Toward the end of World War II, a German-imposed food embargo in western Holland--a densely populated area already suffering from scarce food supplies, ruined agricultural lands, and the onset of an unusually harsh winter--led to the death by starvation of some 30,000 people. Detailed birth records collected during that so-called Dutch Hunger Winter have provided scientists with useful data for analyzing the long-term health effects of prenatal exposure to famine. Not only have researchers linked such exposure to a range of developmental and adult disorders, including low birth weight, diabetes, obesity, coronary heart disease, breast and other cancers, but at least one group has also associated exposure with the birth of smaller-than-normal grandchildren. The finding is remarkable because it suggests that a pregnant mother's diet can affect her health in such a way that not only her children but her grandchildren (and possibly great-grandchildren, etc.) inherit the same health problems.

In another study, unrelated to the Hunger Winter, researchers correlated grandparents' prepubertal access to food with diabetes and heart disease. In other words, you are what your grandmother ate. But, wait, wouldn't that imply what every good biologist knows is practically scientific heresy: the Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics?

If agouti mice are any indication, the answer could be yes. The multicolored rodents make for a fascinating epigenetics story, which Randy Jirtle and Robert Waterland of Duke University told last summer in a Molecular and Cell Biology paper; many of the scientists interviewed for this article still laud and refer to that paper as one of the most exciting recent findings in the field. The Duke researchers showed that diet can dramatically alter heritable phenotypic change in agouti mice, not by changing DNA sequence but by changing the DNA methylation pattern of the mouse genome. "This is going to be just massive," Jirtle says, "because this is where environment interfaces with genomics."

Dust off your biography on J. B. Lamarck, he may be coming back into fashion.

Oh no ... "Lamarck on Trial Too" by Phil Johnson? Egad!

Dick Fischer - Genesis Proclaimed Association
Finding Harmony in Bible, Science, and History
www.genesisproclaimed.org
Received on Sun Jul 4 15:16:58 2004