Word: arounders
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...Around the time he started collecting the data, Bygren had become fascinated with research showing that conditions in the womb could affect your health not only when you were a fetus but well into adulthood. In 1986, for example, the Lancet published the first of two groundbreaking papers showing that if a pregnant woman ate poorly, her child would be at significantly higher than average risk for cardiovascular disease as an adult. Bygren wondered whether that effect could start even before pregnancy: Could parents' experiences early in their lives somehow change the traits they passed to their offspring...
...fathers in the study, 166 said they had started smoking before age 11 - just as their bodies were preparing to enter puberty. Boys are genetically isolated before puberty because they cannot form sperm. (Girls, by contrast, have their eggs from birth.) That makes the period around puberty fertile ground for epigenetic changes: If the environment is going to imprint epigenetic marks on genes in the Y chromosome, what better time to do it than when sperm is first starting to form...
...potential is staggering. For decades, we have stumbled around massive Darwinian roadblocks. DNA, we thought, was an ironclad code that we and our children and their children had to live by. Now we can imagine a world in which we can tinker with DNA, bend it to our will. It will take geneticists and ethicists many years to work out all the implications, but be assured: the age of epigenetics has arrived...
...There has been no concerted effort on the part of the faculty to turn this around, and there is no evidence that the administration would respond to that,” he said...
...officials say, is not simply one of information sharing. At issue in the Abdulmutallab case are the intelligence community's policies to make sure that the information is used in a timely and intelligent way, "stitching it together," as the President put it. "Most of the organizations are built around means of collection, not means of outcomes," explains Dale Meyerrose, who served as the first intelligence community information-sharing executive under Bush, until he left government service in 2008 to join the Harris Corp., a government contractor. (Read "The Lessons of Flight...