What is the epigenetic trauma?
This sort of trauma is defined by the theory that a trauma experienced by one person in a family – for example a parent or grandparent – can be passed down to future generations because of the way that trauma epigenetically alters genes (Valeii, 2024)
跨代貧窮
Jungkoook2025-05-05 14:22:59
Mice and cherry blossom
It’s not only human beings subject to epigenetic processes. Researchers doing controlled experiments with mice have shown an intergenerational effect of trauma associated with scent. In a 2013 study, researchers blew the scent of cherry blossom (actually, acetophenone) through the cages of adult male mice, sending a current of electric shock to their feet at the same time. After a few repetitions of that, the mice associated the smell of cherry blossoms with pain. Shortly after this investigation, the male mice were bred with females, whose pups became jumpier and more nervous upon smelling cherry blossom than pups whose fathers hadn’t been conditioned to dread the smell.
The experimenters ruled out mice learning about the smell from their parents by having the “jumpy” pups raised by unrelated mice who had never smelled cherry blossom. It turned out that the grandpups of the traumatised males also showed greater sensitivity to the scent, even though neither the pups nor the grandpups had greater sensitivity to other smells: just cherry blossom. Researchers later found chemical markers on a gene encoding a smell receptor, expressed in the olfactory bulb between the nose and the brain. At post-humous dissection of these mice brains, researchers also found more neurons that detect the cherry blossom scent than what control mice had (Henriques, 2019).
While all cells in a person’s body share the same genes, different ones are active or silent in different cells. That program largely is locked in place before birth.
But scientists have learned that later experiences — say, exposure to a virus — can cause cells to quiet a gene or boost its activity, sometimes permanently.
The study of this long-term gene control is called epigenetics.