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bombarded with

em

symptoms

Edinburgh

Jonathan Seckl

offspring

life span

stress hormone

inherited

Our studies had really convinced me that it were the later experiences of the child as the child was growing up bombarded with years and years of, em, symptoms from the parents that accounted for the effect that we observed.
However, in Edinburgh, Jonathan Seckl was interested in stress exposure in pregnant women and wondered if stress effects could be transmitted to their children. He started some experiments with pregnant rats to see if exposing them to stress hormones had any effect on their offspring.
And we found the next generation for the rest of the life span those animals themselves had altered stress responses and showed behavior that looked like anxiety.
To see if this was affecting the genes themselves, he decided to breed them and see if the stress effects could be found in generations never exposed to the stress hormone.
And their daughters and sons also got the propensity for abnormal stress responses.
For Seckl the only explanation was that a stressful event was throwing a switch on a gene which was then being inherited.

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