Comments on: Breaking the "Central Dogma"

By: Stephanie

Stephanie — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 23:13:19 +0000

I just learned about epigenetics a month ago, and I for one am VERY excited. It is a HUGE break in my mind. It has provided an answer to questions I’ve had since childhood (a long time ago), some bridge to all the holes in mainstream theories that I’ve been privy to over the decades (I’m not a scientist, just an observor). Of course it’s not the final answer–that’s the beauty of it. Once again we are reminded there is no final answer–by the answer that’s not the final one. I love it.

By: omar

omar — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 20:07:36 +0000

I have not read the book (yet) but it does seem that epigenetics is being hyped beyond its actual potential. First of all, the idea that biologists had no notion of “epi” genetic levels of control a few decades ago is obviously false. We did not know HOW its done, but everyone knew that all the genes are not switched on all the time and in every cell line…some kind of “epigenetics” was taken for granted. While it is true that the notion of intergenerational inheritance of acquired characteristics was vigorously denied, it is not like we are suddenly back to Lamarckism. Only if we find that epigenetic inheritance eventually changes the genetic code itself will we be in the Lamarckian domain and that has not happened yet.

More importantly, we are talking about RELATIVELY subtle effects here. After all, Holland did not lapse into barbarism one generation after the Dutch hunger winter. Some increase in metabolic syndrome and schizophrenia among survivors should not obscure the fact that MOST hunger winter survivors did just fine and are in fact the tallest and close to the healthiest people on this planet. The idea of crude genetic determinism may have been held by some biologists, but is mostly a straw man used to burnish a particular “nurture” bias in influential sections of the intelligentsia.
The human organism is not built up from scratch using a factory blueprint. We are extensions of our parents and connect to an unbroken line of life that is 3.5 billion years old. And every cell is more complex than the largest factory or corporation and every body is made up of trillions of cells and lives with trillions of other living things and a complex non-living environment. Epigenetics is a fascinating field and adds another layer of subtle and wonderful knowledge to our existing understanding of biology, but it is important to keep it in perspective. we cannot “nurture” our way to superman or cro-magnon man in one generation no matter what the environment does to the genome. In fact, we are remarkably stable organisms, given all the chaos in our world..and the DNA code is still the most important and basic arbiter of inheritance. Epigenetics adds to our understanding of biology, but it does not overturn it.

By: Kiwiguy

Kiwiguy — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 08:30:10 +0000

***only discovered epigenetics in 2008, or Google’s index wasn’t very good. I suspect the former, as I started being asked about the term by intellectual non-science types circa 2008. ***

I came across it in 2007 in a book called ‘Survival of the Sickest’. I read the book after seeing the author, Sharon Moalem, on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

By: PeteJ

PeteJ — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 03:22:23 +0000

Nice post Razib. Thanks for calling attention to the most exciting field in science. I’ll offer a few explanations on your graphs. Basically, scientists have been studying epigenetics for a long time, but haven’t really referred to it by the more adopted term used today. Government initiatives combined with an increasing use of the term, which typically comes with an increasing number of peer review publications, have thrown “epigenetics” into the mainstream vocab.

Epigenetics research has been hindered by a technology gap that started being addressed back in 2002 with microarrays, but more so today with next generation sequencing. This is shown in your Google Scholar plot of publications. These are the tools that were necessary to boost epigenetics’ relevance into almost every lab and the momentum continues fortunately.

Keep the coverage coming!

By: I_Affe

I_Affe — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 00:09:13 +0000

Of course I also had a rather conservative classmate during my undergrad years who refused to use the term epigenetics, instead preferring something like gene expression modification or some variation thereof.

By: I_Affe

I_Affe — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 00:02:44 +0000

On your last sentence, I've a few liberal friends who know a little about genetics (at least the central dogma plus a little more) and are somewhat excited about epigenetics, in that they believe that it strikes a blow about genetic determinism. I usually send them this book review from Nature. It's a decent summarizing review, though, I've never actually read the book reviewed in the article.