Nova: Ghost In Your Genes"....

[Bigmack]

Startling stuff on Nova "Ghost in Your Genes". Apparently our genes are being changed all the time by our lifestyles and exposures to smoke and sun. Some really shocking things in this program.... what happened to your grandmother while she was in utero can change your genetic susceptibility to disease.

See it in repeats.

info at: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/genes/

"For decades, scientists and doctors assumed that cancer was caused by irreversible damage to some critical stretch of DNA within one's genome. But in the last few years, a much more complex picture has emerged, one that shows that some cancers are caused by epigenetic changes—tiny chemical tags that accumulate over time and can turn genes on or off. Unlike genetic damage, epigenetic changes can sometimes be reversed, and with treatments that are far less toxic to the patient."

"The realization that the epigenome is so important to health and disease is really fundamental, because we now understand that the epigenome is something we can do something about, as opposed to the genome, which is what we are born with that we can really not modify. The epigenome is a little more dynamic. Potentially what we eat in infancy and what we eat in development could affect the health of our epigenome. But it is more than that. Smoking and exposures and lifestyle habits can affect our epigenome. And perhaps more interestingly, not to be negative all the time, there might be interventions that would make our epigenome more healthy."

[theHandpuppet]

1. Saw it last night on PBS

Fascinating stuff!