The Maternal Imprint

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From Homer to the Bible, and Aristotle to Descartes, expert and common knowledge held that a pregnant woman's emotions and experiences could "imprint" on the fetus, leading to features such as birthmarks, deformities, and distinctive personality traits. Beginning with the advent of modern genetics at the turn of the twentieth century, however, biomedical scientists dismissed any notion that a mother-except in cases of extreme deprivation or injury-could alter her offspring's traits. Consensus asserted that the fetus was walled off from a woman's body by the placenta and that a child's fate was set by a combination of its genes and post-birth upbringing. Over the last fifty years, this consensus was dismantled. Today, research on the intrauterine environment and its effects on the fetus is emerging as a robust program of study in medicine, public health, psychology, evolutionary biology, and genomics. Some researchers claim that these maternal effects represent a biologically important but non-genetic form of inheritance, potentially refracting the mother's experiences and exposures across generations of descendants. Tracing a genealogy of ideas about heredity and maternal-fetal effects, The Maternal Imprint offers a critical analysis of conceptual and ethical issues provoked by the striking rise of epigenetics and fetal origins science in postgenomic biology today"--