探索世界之基因外遺傳現象 The Ghost In Your Genes 8

No body had had seen this kind of thing before, so this was the first time and all the people looking at the gel and saying "No, this can't be right and that's the wrong gel", you know, how you get excited about it, and then you think oh, maybe this is wrong and you are not on the right track. And we were very excited, as excited as scientists ever get.

This meant that the genes were not locked away. A simple environmental event could affect the way genes worked. And that could be inherited, as if a memory of an event was being passed down through generations. It was something many scientists regarded as impossible. If this effect could be observed in humans, the implications would be profound. It would mean that what we experience could affect not just us but our children and our grandchildren.

While these observations were just emerging from laboratories, Pembrey was still working at Great Ormond Street. He began to wonder why these links between generations would exist.

Now my reputation was made as a clinical geneticist, and so I was much freer to speculate outside my main career. I also like to stir things up a bit and it amuses me to speculate because I got nothing to lose. And if I'm right, well then that's very amusing. heheh...

He speculated why genes would carry a memory from one generation to the next. What evolutionary purpose could it serve?

Maybe imprinting was used as a means of some sort of trans-generational adaption.

He thought it could be used for a mother to send messages to her baby in the next generation.

Something that always puzzled me ever since I was a medical student was what stops the baby's head jamming up in the birth canal.

The baby of course is growing in one generation, but the mother's pelvis was growing in the previous generation. So if the mother was starving when she was growing, so she had a small pelvis. Maybe her eggs had captured that information and so they were instructing the growth genes of the future babies to not work so much and for the baby not to grow too much so as to jam up in the birth canal. So, so there was some sort of coordination between the growths in two generations. That struck me as entirely reasonable.

He published his ideas in an obscure journal and largely forgot about it. After all, there was no evidence for any of this. It was pure speculation. Then four years later Marcus received an E-mail from a doctor in Sweden.

Really came as a bolt out of the blue I just got an E-mail in May 2000 saying my paper was the only thing he could find in the literature, that in anyway, er, sort of tied in with his basic observations.

New Words & Phrases:

gel: Gel is a thick jelly-like substance, especially one used to keep your hair in a particular style. 膠體;凝膠

pelvis : Your pelvis is the wide, curved group of bones at the level of your hips. 【解】骨盆