Hints:

life expectancy

Overkalix

epigenetic inheritance

mechanism

environmental exposure

heretical

Pembrey

trans-generational

Bygren

sensitive periods

It looked as if there were clear links through the generations between grandparents and grandchildren. They found that the life expectancy of grandchildren was being directly affected by the diet of the grandparent. It appeared that Overkalix held the key to finding the first evidence of epigenetic inheritance in humans.
It really did look as if there were some new mechanism transmitting environmental exposure information from one generation to the next.
Because these ideas were so heretical, Pembrey knew that the results could be dismissed as nothing more than a curiosity. They needed to get an understanding of how this was happening. How could the grandparent capture the information that was affecting the grandchildren?
We wanted to tease out when you could trigger in the ancestor a trans-generational response.
So he and Bygren went back to the data and looked again. The more they looked, the more patterns started to appear.
We were able to look at the food supply every year in the grandfather and the grandmother from the moment they were conceived right through into the age of 20. We found that there're only certain periods in the ancestor's development when they can trigger this trans-generational response. They're, what one might call, sensitive periods of development.

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