Project4_part2_such_saturation

Transcribed by Such_Saturation

R: Raymond Peat
H: Host

R and

H Do you also think it's more a product of the environment perhaps in that arthritic type of situation perhaps?

R Yeah, and constantly, like, they put forty mice I think was in a stimulating environment and found that just by

the choices they made in their daily life they became very different in personality and behaviour, just by where

they happened to go in the environment influencing what they learned, and over their lifetime they became very

recognizable individuals. And that would really upset medicine if they had to consider everyone as a unique

H That's right

R individual, all the way

H Yeah

R down to the way their genes worked, because there would be no

H It would be too considerate

R Yeah, no exact definition of a disease, it would be "your disease, this month"

H Yeah, Yeah, interesting. I wonder what it is in the animals in that mice study perhaps that made the individual

mice do things differently that gave them the better outcome there.

R Possibly just which one was the first one to be weaned and wander off and have an experience

H Right

R and that stimulated them in a way that the others didn't experience

H Ok, go on

R The genes are being used constantly, everything you do is using your genes in a certain way, that varies

according to whether you're awake or asleep for example. But if you're starving, day after day, this is going to

pull up an accumulation of changes, not just the quick on-and-off effect of day and night, or incidental

experiences, but it will accumulate sort of an inertia and layer after layer will be laid down in the stuff around

your genes, attaching carbon atoms to the DNA itself, and attaching a great variety of molecules to the proteins

that handle the genes, the histones that surround the chromosomes and move the genes to make them

accessible for copying and functioning. These are relatively easy to change, the methylation is a little more

sluggish, and when you are in an extremely stressful situation a lot of your genes get turned off, methylated

especially, and those can be identified in the chromosomes that you inherit from your father or mother

specifically. So, if your father had a very hard life, you can identify the highly methylated genes in your

chromosomes that came from that hard life.

H So that's inheritable then?

R Yeah. And in animal experiments it takes several generations for a very bad generation's experience to be

removed when they're put into a normal environment, but if you put them into a super-environment like the

H Enriched environment

R enriched, yeah, it's very stimulating, you can repair the previous generation's damage very quickly, and some

nutrients and drugs can do that, remove methyl groups from the DNA and attach more of the opening groups to

the histones.