There’s a revolution going on in neuroscience, says science writer Kayt Sukel, and it’s happening on two fronts. One way the science is changing: researchers are finally beginning to include both male and female subjects in their studies. Another is epigenetics, a new way of understanding the centuries-old nature versus nurture debate.
Epigeneticists look at the different ways a gene is expressed over an individual organism’s lifetime, rather than the way they’re passed along over an epoch. In the epigenetic framework, your genes are seen as predilections, not as destiny: switches that can be turned off or turned on by your environment, without changing the underlying DNA sequence. For example, some people have a predisposition to get psoriasis, an autoimmune disorder of the skin. But it takes a traumatic physical or emotional event for the disease to actually appear.
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