How early life experience is written into DNA | Moshe Szyf

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 30 March 2017

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Moshe Szyf is a pioneer in the field of epigenetics, the study of how living things reprogram their genome in response to social factors like stress and lack of food. His research suggests that biochemical signals passed from mothers to offspring tell the child what kind of world they're going to live in, changing the expression of genes. "DNA isn't just a sequence of letters; it's not just a script." Szyf says. "DNA is a dynamic movie in which our experiences are being written."

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This TED Talk features geneticist Mausci Schiff recorded live at TEDx Gradoslava, 2016.
0:18.0	So it all came to life in a dark bar in Madrid. I encountered my colleague from McGill, Michael
0:25.9	Meaney. And we were drinking a few beers. And like scientists do, he told me about his work. And he
0:34.3	told me that he is interested in how mother rats lick their pups after they were born.
0:43.1	And I was sitting there and saying, this is where my tax dollars are wasted on this kind of soft science.
0:53.3	And he started telling me that when the rats, like humans,
0:59.6	lick their pups in very different ways,
1:02.0	some mothers do a lot of that,
1:04.7	some mothers do very little,
1:07.0	and most are in between.
1:09.3	But what's interesting about it is that when he follows these pups when they become adults,
1:16.6	like years in human life, long after their mother died,
1:20.6	they are completely different animals.
1:22.6	The animals that were licked and groomed heavily,
1:26.6	the high licking and grooming are not stressed.
1:31.3	They have different sexual behavior.
1:33.3	They have different way of living
1:36.3	than those that were not treated as intensively by her mother.
1:42.3	So then I was thinking to myself, is this magic?
1:48.2	How does this work?
1:50.0	As geneticists would like you to think,
1:53.1	perhaps the mother had the bad mother gene
	...

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