The Myth of Normal 57

ever natural disasters, the storm left many Quebecers without heat or electricity. The more “objective stress” that pregnant women had to live through during those trying days—as in concrete, measurable factors like darkness, cold, and home damage[*]—the more their kids’ physiology was marked by that adversity even near puberty. (The participants were of a similar socioeconomic, cultural, and ethnic background, and lived in the same suburban area.) “Over the years [of tracking the children],” Suzanne King, a professor of psychiatry at McGill University said, “we found that that objective stress explained how kids varied one from another in a whole host of things: language, BMI [body mass index] and obesity, insulin secretion, their immune system.”[6] Even IQ was affected. “We also saw increased asthma,” Dr. Szyf added, “as well as increased inflammatory genes and immune genes that are connected with autoimmunity.” I should emphasize that mothers aren’t alone in transmitting chronic disturbances of the body’s stress apparatus to their young. In one experiment, healthy male mice were vexed by a series of stressors: frequent cage changes, constant light or white noise, exposure to fox odor, being restrained in a small tube, and so on. They were then mated with non-stressed females who provided their pups with perfectly good mothering. Their young showed impaired stress-response behaviors and blunted stress hormone patterns. In other words, despite the mothers’ best efforts, the fathers had transmitted the disturbing effects through their sperm.[7] In humans, paternal stress early in a child’s life can also have long-term effects, into adolescence at the least. Adversity among both mothers and fathers bear “reliable linkages” to the epigenetic profiles of the children, a group of researchers concluded.[8] Socioeconomic circumstances, too, can alter the epigenome—the web of epigenetic influences on genes. The indefatigable Dr. Szyf teamed with scientists from Canada and the U.K. to study the epigenetic workings of a broad range of genes in blood samples of middle-aged British males. The study subjects had begun life at opposite ends of the wealth-to-poverty spectrum, some poor and others rich. Gene expression in those who were born well-off was markedly different from that observed in their counterparts who grew up disadvantaged.[9]