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The science of epigenetics is a novel idea

Linda Morris

Published: May 17 2017 - 8:01AM

The idea that trauma can cross generations, that the health of parents or grandparents
can influence, if not predict, body weight and shape and the mental state of the
newborn is an explosive new field of science.

Epigenetics attempts to understand how a person's genes might be switched on or off,

how twins with virtually the same DNA profile act differently and why children might
be born troubled, anxious and prone to depression.

It's exploratory territory for the writer, too.

Sydney-based novelist, Mireille Juchau, is one of two writers appointed this week to a
year-long residency at the University of Sydney's Charles Perkins Centre, working
side-by-side with researchers and clinicians tackling some of the biggest public health
scourges of modern times – obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

The author of The World Without Us, last year's winner of the Victorian Premier's
Literary Award, will use the fellowship to research a novel exploring contemporary
life, looking at twin studies coordinated by the centre as well as flagship research into
the impact of maternal and paternal obesity, nutrition, exercise, gestational diabetes,
sleep disturbances and depression on fetal outcomes.

"I have a cluster of ideas that centre on doubles and doubling,'' Juchau says.
''In epigenetics there's the idea of a return of a traumatic experience in the next
generation, that's a form of shadowing.

''I've read a lot, too, about how the mother's body is fundamentally changed by having
carried a child. It's been found that really early in a pregnancy cells from the fetus
actually migrate into the mother's body so the fetus changes the mother's body on a
cellular level, not just a physiological level. It seems to me these questions about
consciousness and the body, about inheritance and creation burn at the centre of all
our lives, they shape our cultural, individual and communal identities.''
While the triggers are still largely unknown, the centre's academic director Professor
Stephen Simpson says understanding the way a person's genetic imprint may be
influenced in utero and at preconception stage represents the next wave of
improvement to childhood health. Playwright Alana Valentine has also received
a $100,000 residency to research a play drawing on the experience of a group of
scientists who have for many decades sounded the alarm about metabolic syndrome, a
collection of health conditions that often occur together in the overweight.

Valentine has called her project Dr Cassandra from the Greek myth of
Cassandra whose dire prophecies were also ignored.

"I have spent a lot of my career as a playwright looking at communities and how they
work and how the people within them survive and thrive, rely on each other or lose
their minds," Valentine says. "What's it like to be a person living with this global
disaster that keeps getting worse and worse and no one seems to be interested?"

Valentine plans to interview scientists, stage readings and bring her project to the
stage. There may even be an opportunity for scientists to take on theatrical roles.

Inaugural fellow Charlotte Wood, who ends her residency this month, said science
had taken her next novel, about ageing friends, in new directions.

''Our culture's central assumption about ageing is that it means only one thing – loss,"
she says. "We're obsessed with the idea that old age can only mean subtraction: of
complexity and meaning and pleasure, until all that's left is – oldness.

''And I fear that if we believe this, if we internalise it in the ways we internalise all
kinds of other prejudice, it becomes true.

"I'm hoping there are more than these two ways of thinking about growing old, and
will continue to explore that and hopefully continue my conversations with
scientists now my official residency is coming to an end.''

This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/the-science-

of-epigenetics-is-a-novel-idea-20170512-gw39mi.html

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