探索世界奥秘之The Ghost In Your Genes(基因外遗传现象) Unit10

Our studies had really convinced me that it were the later experiences of the child as the child was growing up bombarded with years and years of, em, symptoms from the parents that accounted for the effect that we observed.

However, in Edinburgh, Jonathan Seckl was interested in stress exposure in pregnant women and wondered if stress effects could be transmitted to their children. He started some experiments with pregnant rats to see if exposing them to stress hormones had any effect on their offspring.

And we found the next generation for the rest of the life span those animals themselves had altered stress responses and showed behavior that looked like anxiety.

To see if this was affecting the genes themselves, he decided to breed them and see if the stress effects could be found in generations never exposed to the stress hormone.

And their daughters and sons also got the propensity for abnormal stress responses.

For Seckl the only explanation was that a stressful event was throwing a switch on a gene which was then being inherited.

Oh! Come on! Let's go! Let's go! Come on! Come on!

His work might have stopped there until world events took a hand. When on 9/11 the planes crashed and the towers came down, Yehuda and Seckl were critically aware of the potential for the impact to be far reaching, even affecting generations yet to be born. Ailsa Gilliam was working in a building next to the towers.

As I left my building, coming out through the doors, there was a lot of ash floating through the air and some office papers. I knew that if I looked up, I may see something I didn't wanna see. Just the thought that people had died close to me. I pulled it down. I got very upset. I wanted to get out of the environment. Being pregnant, I did not want to open myself up to more emotional uncertainty and emotional distress.

After the events of 9/11 unfolded, Yehuda and Seckl teamed up to study women like Ailsa who were pregnant at the time.

There were a lot of different opportunities to examine what the effects of 9/11 would be on the children who might be born to parents who developed post-traumatic stress disorder in response to 9/11, and particularly those who had been exposed in uteri.

When exposed to a stressful event, a person produces cortisol---- a hormone that helps regulate the body's response to that stress. If cortisol levels are too low a person finds coping with stress very difficult and are prone to PTSD: post-traumatic stress disorder.

New Words & Phrases:

bombard: If you bombard someone with something, you make them face a great deal of it. For example, if you bombard them with questions or criticism, you keep asking them a lot of questions or you keep criticizing them. 不断攻击;向...连续提出问题[(+with)]

cortisol: Cortisol is a hormone which is active in the brain while people are stressed. 【生化】考的索,皮质醇