Michael Skinner at Washington State University in Pullman says epigenetic effects are swinging the pendulum of scientific attention from the genetic code back toward the impact of environment.
“I think that we’re eventually going to have sort of a merger of this,” he says. “I think that we’re going to have an appreciation of the fact that there is an environmental influence on biology that probably through more epigenetic mechanisms. There’s also a baseline genetic element of biology. And the two combined will actually give us more information about how things work.”
Much of epigenetics is still a mystery. Scientists would like to know, for instance, how often epigenetic signals are passed on from parent to child, or even grandchild. So Morris, in Australia, is hoping to repeat her experiment and see if the effect persists over multiple generations.