探索世界奥秘之The Ghost In Your Genes(基因外遗传现象) Unit15

The work of these scientists is at last throwing a spotlight onto the mysterious hidden world of epigenetics. They appear to show that the lives of our ancestors have a capacity to affect us directly.

These results are provocative. Some find them, them, very difficult to accept. But it's quite clear now that a number of laboratories are finding similar findings in the various systems that they are interested in. So the phenomena are there.

Epigenetics has the capacity to reach into every aspect of our lives and links our past, present and future in previously unimagined ways.

I think this will be the next revolution in molecular biology. This is, this really could be a paradigm shift we did not expect, could explain a lot of things.

There are many diseases, very common diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, of the, of the brain, diabetes, which are very difficult to explain currently genetically. Maybe a lot of this kind of very common diseases are actually caused by epigenetic switches.

We are just at the beginning. There is much that is unknown. But what is clear is that it will change the way we think about ourselves forever.

I've thought of nothing else really for the last 5 years. It is said the first time, you know, one had a photograph of the earth, you know, they saw a delicate thing sailing through, sailing through the universe, you know, it, it had a huge effect on the, the sort of, em, save-the-planet type of feeling, you know. I'm sure that's part of why the future generations think in a planetary way because they've, they've actually seen that picture, you know. And this might be the same. It may get to a point where they, they realize that you live your life as a sort of, I don't know, a sort of a guardian of your genome. Should mean you gotta be careful of it because it's not just you. You can't be selfish because you can't say "Well, I'll smoke or I'll do whatever it is because I'm prepared to die early". Em, er, you're also looking after it for your, er, children and grandchildren.

New Words & Phrases:

paradigm : A paradigm is a model for something which explains it or shows how it can be produced. 范例