Word: pembrey
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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Published in the Italian journal Acta Geneticae Medicae et Gemellologiae, Pembrey's paper, now considered seminal in epigenetic theory, was contentious at the time; major journals had rejected it. Although he is a committed Darwinist, Pembrey used the paper - a review of available epigenetic science - to speculate beyond Darwin: What if the environmental pressures and social changes of the industrial age had become so powerful that evolution had begun to demand that our genes respond faster? What if our DNA now had to react not over many generations and millions of years but, as Pembrey wrote, within...
This shortened timetable would mean that genes themselves wouldn't have had enough years to change. But, Pembrey reasoned, maybe the epigenetic marks atop DNA would have had time to change. Pembrey wasn't sure how you would test such a grand theory, and he put the idea aside after the Acta paper appeared. But in May 2000, out of the blue, he received an e-mail from Bygren - whom he did not know - about the Overkalix life-expectancy data. The two struck up a friendship and began discussing how to construct a new experiment that would clarify the Overkalix...
...Pembrey and Bygren knew they needed to replicate the Overkalix findings, but of course you can't conduct an experiment in which some kids starve and others overeat. (You also wouldn't want to wait 60 years for the results.) By coincidence, Pembrey had access to another incredible trove of genetic information. He had long been on the board of the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), a unique research project based at the University of Bristol, in England. Founded by Pembrey's friend Jean Golding, an epidemiologist at the university, ALSPAC has followed thousands of young people...
...Pembrey, Bygren and Golding - now all working together - used the data to produce a more groundbreaking paper, the most compelling epigenetic study yet written. Published in 2006 in the European Journal of Human Genetics, it noted that of the 14,024 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...
...When Pembrey, Bygren and Golding looked at the sons of those 166 early smokers, it turned out that the boys had significantly higher body mass indexes than other boys by age 9. That means the sons of men who smoke in prepuberty will be at higher risk for obesity and other health problems well into adulthood. It's very likely these boys will also have shorter life spans, just as the children of the Overkalix overeaters did. "The coherence between the ALSPAC and Overkalix results in terms of the exposure-sensitive periods and sex specificity supports the hypothesis that there...