Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Passing on Fear


You know when see a family member who you haven’t seen in a long time and they rave about how you look just like your parents. This is because of genetic traits. Everybody has genetic traits. When women have children each parent transfers or passes traits to the child which explains why children resemble their parents. But according to Laura Sander’s article, phenotypes aren’t the only things that are inherited by parents.  Children can also inherit fear. This was discovered through an experiment done in mice by Brian Dias and Kerry Ressler.  The results showed that a person’s traumatic experience can have a long lasting effect where it can be passed on to the next generation and on. The test involved mice receiving an electric shock every time the smelled orange blossoms. After the experiment was conducted, the offspring of these mice were afraid of smelling orange blossoms. The offspring were never exposed to the shock so it was very surprising that they experienced the same fear as their parents. The test changed the DNA structure of the gene in the shocked mice. It did not damage the gene, but caused a chemical switch that cause the gene to turn on or off. So if you ever noticed some similarities in fears with your parents, it’s probably because they passed on the trait to you.  


Orange Blossoms used  on the mice for the shocking test

Posted by Chelcie Claude 


7 comments:

  1. At first this seems like a very surprising result. In the light of evolution however it makes a lot of sense for an organism to pass on a very powerful fear. What makes this even more surprising to me is that the fear isn't already prevalent in the adults. As in this fear was taught, and had not already evolved within the species. This sort of epigenetic mechanism is incredibly fascinating in how we understand our genes and what information gets passed on to the next generation.

    Posted by Kirk MacKinnon

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  2. This article was very interesting. I never really thought about fear being passed on from generation to generation. Is there a similar test done on humans? I wonder if I got the fear of spiders from my mother.

    Amber Vien

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  3. Epigenetics is a relatively new field. Entire segments of DNA can be turned on or off depending on environmental variables and that configuration is often passed on to offspring. I believe I remember a study done on a small town of people with unusually good genealogical records which showed that conditions of surplus or starvation in parents would directly correlate to their children's weight and risk of cardiovascular disease. More research into the exact mechanisms of regulation may offer avenues to deactivate dangerous genes, without intensive retroviral therapy that completely rewrites that segment of DNA.

    -Stephen O'Brien

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  4. Wow, this was a very good post, and interesting. I always wondered if things like fear were things that could have been passed down by genetics. There should be a test for humans, because that may be able to explain alot of similarities amongst children and their parents besides just features.

    Posted By Maylissa Charmant

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  5. Thanks for sharing this. It would be interesting to know the extent of the fear for it to be passed down. Does it have to be a traumatic experience for it to be passed down, or can it be a petty fear like the fear of heights?

    -Samuel Ustayev

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  6. Samuel, I feel like it can be both petty and traumatic cause my mother and all my siblings are terrified of dogs. She must of passed that fear each of us.

    -Chelcie C.

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  7. Wow, Stephan the study on the starving parents and the cardiovascular disease is really interesting. Was there a correlation?

    -Chelcie C.

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