Environmental effects on our genes
What may have been the most famous fraud in biology — Austrian biologist Paul Kammerer’s midwife toad experiments — is actually the basis for epigenetics. Epigenetics, for those unfamiliar, is a fascinating new field where genes are turned on and off based on environmental factors.
Newsweek magazine published a story online today, which will appear in the September 28 magazine issue, explaining how Kammerer was probably right. Unfortunately, he went too far to prove his case and was exposed for injecting India ink into a toad. He committed suicide six weeks later and Arthur Koestler made the saga the subject of his 1971 book, The Case of the Midwife Toad.
Check out What Alters Our Genes in the latest issue of Newsweek.
For those interested in more information on epigenetics, watch The Ghost in Your Genes, a 4-part series, from PBS’s Science NOVA.