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DNA May Carry a Memory of Your Living Conditions From Childhood
An anonymous reader writes "Canadian and British scientists have found that how rich your family was when you were a kid — as judged by wealth, housing conditions and occupation of parents — has a huge impact on your current DNA. 'This is the first time we've been able to make the link between the economics of early life and the biochemistry of DNA,' says Moshe Szyf, professor of pharmacology at McGill University. The study did not show whether the DNA changes identified are passed on to offspring, but if so, repeat cycles of poverty could be putting poor children at a serious disadvantage for heart disease, diabetes and lung disorders."
"but if so, repeat cycles of poverty could be putting poor children at a serious disadvantage for heart disease, diabetes and lung disorders."
What is this based on? Perhaps extra robustness is built in for exactly the reason that you may run more risk? So having poor parents may actually give you an advantage...
Maybe one could make a computer analogy: Even with a read-only hard disk your computer may behave very differently if different parts of the code on the hard disk are executed. An an extreme example, let it be a dual boot system where a single key press early on decides whether the Windows partition or the Linux partition is executed. Same hard disk content, radically different behaviour.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Sounds a lot like a Nova program I saw some time ago. It titled 'Ghost in your genes'. It talked about how epigenetics control how your genes are expressed and they had noticed some inherited traits based on whether the ancestors were poor, starving, folk or not.
I grew up poor. I got meat on my table for the cost of a bullet and dodging the game warden in the off season. I got vegetables on my table because we gleaned the commercial fields to gather what was left over from the combine harvesters before it spoiled. We had bread because my mother was willing to buy hogs feed, mill it herself and bake it. I grew up in a house with a dirt floor and no insulation in rural Montana. I grew up getting a grand total of 2 cheap toys a year, 1 for my birthday and 1 for Christmas. I know what its like to have to choose between seeing a doctor and paying rent. I still have clothes I wore 20 years ago because I don't throw anything away. I've had to work my fingers to the bone to grind my way out of abject and total poverty. And I am a lucky one, born gifted with intellect that puts me in the 99.99 percentile.
Fuck you. Fuck you ignorant condescension and feeble immorality. And by the way, failure to provide health care often leads to death, violating Maslows physiological need to breath, and otherwise sets on the second tier of safety. Education ties in to employment and indirectly the ability to provide food, again setting in the two most basic tiers. You are just wrong.