A recent scientific paper claiming that the children of Holocaust survivors showed evidence of inherited stress was deeply flawed - heres whyRecently,the Guardian published a legend based on a scientific paper that claimed the stress experienced by Holocaust survivors somehow was detectable in their children through a process known as epigenetics. The paper was riddled with flaws: the scientists studied blood, which is a mixture of cell types, and meaning there are any number of causes for the changes reported. The scientists only looked at a tiny subset of genes. They had an absurdly small sample size of 32 people,a tiny eight-person control group, who didn’t really see like salubrious controls, and produced a contorted argument for why their data supported their original speculation. The paper probably shouldn’t have made it through to the scientific literature,and it certainly shouldn’t have made it to your Saturday breakfast reading. I don’t believe it and I’ll outline some reasons why below.
The scientific paper and newspaper legend point to a rising interest in epigenetics. This is a seductive but rather slippery word that has come to mean a variety of things in relation to how molecular structures close to DNA work, in particular modification of DNA bases by methylation. It is certainly exciting, and has become a main mechanism to explain how the environment communicates with our genes. But it’s also easy to oversimplify,and has been set up by some people as an inaccurate alternative to genetics.
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Source: theguardian.com