Biology stands on the brink of a shift in the understanding of inheritance. The discovery of epigenetics hidden influences upon the genes could affect every aspect of our lives. At the heart of this new field is a simple but contentious idea that genes have a ‘memory’. That the lives of your grandparents the air they breathed, the food they ate, even the things they saw can directly affect you, decades later, despite your never experiencing these things yourself. And that what you do in your lifetime could in turn affect your grandchildren. The conventional view is that DNA carries all our heritable information and that nothing an individual does in their lifetime will be biologically passed to their children. To many scientists, epigenetics amounts to a heresy, calling into question the accepted view of the DNA sequence a cornerstone on which modern biology sits. Epigenetics adds a whole new layer to genes beyond the DNA. It proposes a control system of ‘switches’ that turn genes on or off and suggests that things people experience, like nutrition and stress, can control these switches and cause heritable effects in humans. In a remote town in northern Sweden there is evidence for this radical idea. Lying in Överkalix’s parish registries of births and deaths and its detailed harvest records is a secret that confounds traditional scientific thinking. Marcus Pembrey, a Professor of Clinical Genetics at the Institute of Child Health in London, in collaboration with Swedish …
Video Rating: 5 / 5
i still think that over-stimluation of the ovaries for egg harvesting is actually the cause of increased bws in ivf
These seem somewhat plausable, this is a very well made documentary.
anyone ever read Ender’s Game? this is like the idea behind the telepathic community of aliens that are the antagonists in that novel. Or more precisely, they start as t
What is the mechanism whereby these life-experiences are transmitted to the egg cells? I am under stress; stress is caused by heightened or reduced levels of some hormone; the egg cells then pick up on this? How do the hell do the chromosomal genes in the egg cells know which experiences are relevant to their on-off states?
Okay, I have a question: The women near the end talks about how the experience of the holocaust effect the grandchildren and children of the survivors, but what were those symptoms? If it’s just that they worry (no pun intended, please understand) couldn’t that be due more to sociological/lifestyle reason then genetics?
@bpine20: Oh, sorry, just watched Part 4.
@CooCurrent: Thank you for posting these videos!
can someone Explain all this to me as easy as possible ???
@Andre2Dayle watch part 1!
it makes darwin theory more believable… cos that thingy about random mutations that are Randomly better adapted to the entorn didnt sound completely right.
@Andre2Dayle
DNA is packaged into a chromosome.
When DNA is tightly packaged into a chromosome, transcription proteins cant access the DNA.
When parts of the DNA are loosely packaged the transcription proteins can access the DNA to make RNA.
So this video is talking about how the packaging of DNA can be inherited and change the way an organism looks or functions. The changes in packaging can be a result of environmental factors.
Watch “On epigenetics (part I)” – its helpful