4/28/2010 PERMALINK
'Epigenetic' concepts offer a new approach to understanding the degenerative disease that arrive as you age. The new field of 'epigenetics' is rapidly revealing how people, plants and animals do start with a certain genetic code at conception. But, the choice of which genes are 'expressed,' or activated, is strongly affected by environmental influences. The expression of genes can change quite rapidly over time, they can be influenced by external factors, those changes can be passed along to offspring, and they can literally hold the key to life and death. According to Rod Dashwood, a professor of environmental and molecular toxicology at the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University, epigenetics is a unifying theory in which many health problems, ranging from cancer to cardiovascular disease and neurological disorders, can all be caused at least in part by altered "histone modifications," and their effects on the reading of DNA in cells.