Journal Article

Certain special observers of this cataclysm were the subjects of interest to two scientists who had the presence of mind to collect precious sought-after data. They were patently aware of the potentially far-reaching consequences of such a calamity. They had been studying a much-unexpected effect of another impactful world event that perhaps a detailed study of some of the witnesses of 9-11 would help clarify. The subjects of interest: pregnant women who were eyewitnesses and in close proximity to “ground zero.”

First, some background… Years before 9-11, the two scientists Rachel Yehuda, PhD, Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience and Director of the Traumatic Stress Studies Division at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, in New York City, and Jonathan Seckl, Moncrieff-Arnott Professor of Molecular Medicine at the University of Edinburgh had been trying to figure out a puzzling observation among survivors of the Nazi holocaust, deliberately traumatized laboratory rats, and the offspring of both. It appeared to Yehuda that the children of survivors were being diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) at an alarming rate – approximately five-fold greater than found among the survivors themselves. These adult children appeared to be victims of the holocaust that they themselves had not experienced! How could that be?

Were they responding to the repeated stories they had heard of the holocaust so many times over? Or, were they responding across one generation to the holocaust itself, an event for which they were not present? Meanwhile in Edinburgh, Professor Seckl was finding that the stress response induced in laboratory animals appeared to be transmissible to their progeny who themselves were not directly subjected to trauma. Could it really be that information about an event experienced by a parent can be passed on to the subsequent generation?

To begin to settle the issue in humans, what was needed was an event with holocaust-like impact to see if the children in utero at the time of their mothers’ exposure would behave as though they themselves had witnessed and experienced the event itself. At stake was the plausibility of the idea that information about acquired experiences could be transmitted from mother to unborn child, the passing on, if you will, of genetic memory of a stressful event experienced during the extra-uterine lifetime of the mother.

Many would think that the preposterous idea that life events can be passed on to the offspring was debunked by the work of Gregor Mendel. Mendel demonstrated that the inheritance of traits followed particular patterns, and his observed “Laws of Inheritance” form the basis of the modern science of genetics. “Genes don’t change in response to life circumstances, and the only way to inherit traits is through genes” goes one genetic dogma. Up to the time of the Nazi holocaust, and even more recently, anyone who would believe otherwise would probably be labeled “naïve” or “misguided.”

Now, Mendel died in 1884, but it was not until 1902 that the medical establishment of the day re-discovered his work and in the spring of that year three papers were published sealing the fact that Mendelian inheritance is “the way” plants, animals and humans pass on traits. This flew in the face of the then prevailing biological thought known as Blending Inheritance. According to this theory, the inherited traits are bounded by the homologous traits of parents; e.g. the height of a person with one tall and one short parent, for instance, was thought to always be of some intermediate value between its two parents’ heights. Even though not officially taught, this was the emergent truism of the informed since alternatives acceptable to the less “scientific” thinkers before them had become outmoded. The French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829), and later Charles Darwin himself Mendel’s contemporary, were proponents of inherited acquired traits. Darwin even posited that his evidence was confirmatory by observing that traumatic injuries to two fathers had produced children with scars in the same places as those of their dads! Mendel, commenting on Darwin’s work, believed he had it wrong in this area. The shortcomings of this theory should have been obvious but there were competing ideas at the time and no one theory explained all of the observed facts.

To compound matters, there was little concrete knowledge of human reproduction in the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century. The views of Hipocrates and Galen had long been replaced by the Aristotelian view of epigenesis modified by anatomist William Harvey in the 1640s which stated that “the female ovaries produced eggs that were propelled into the womb by the magnetic force of the male semen and, once united, produces a homogenous mass which underwent a process of epigenesis – the formation of organs from non-organ tissue.” But, during the time between the Great Disappointment and 1863, the year of the first comprehensive vision of health reported by Ellen G. White, there were competing theories between the “epigenesists” and the “preformationists” (who believed that the embryo existed before fecundation) on the one hand, and between the “preformationist-ovists” and “preformationist-spermists” on the other. The latter two both claimed to have seen, microscopically, entire mini embryos inside the egg and the sperm respectively. The “preformationist” view was the prevailing view during the period of the formation of the early Seventh-day Adventist Church and lent itself to political support since preformation made it seem inevitable that “servants beget servants and kings beget kings…” a “fact” which implicitly legitimized the dynastic, antidemocratic systems.

With this background in mind, and in the midst of these confused and competing ideas, some look with skepticism at statements made by an unschooled religionist, Ellen G. White, at the dawn of the 20th century. When she wrote in Ministry of Healing, p.372 (1905) that “mothers should be careful when pregnant lest they affect their unborn offspring,” and “…what the parents are, that, to a great extent, the children will be. The physical conditions of the parents, their dispositions and appetites, their mental and moral tendencies, are, to a greater or less degree, reproduced in their children” there was no scientific consensus to support her. She certainly was no “preformationist-spermist” and sounded more like the outmoded Lamarck than the rising and then recently accepted Mendel, but her statements are recorded for all to see: “What the parents are, that, to a great extent, the children will be. The physical conditions of the parents, their dispositions and appetites, their mental and moral tendencies, are, to a greater or less degree, reproduced in their children.” (Ministry of Healing, p.372)

But she does not stop there. On page 373 of the same book she declares: “especially does responsibility rest upon the mother. She, by whose lifeblood the child is nourished and its physical frame built up, imparts to it also mental and spiritual influences that tend to the shaping of mind and character,” and continued “…the effect of prenatal influences is by many parents looked upon as a matter of little moment; but heaven does not so regard it. The message sent by an angel of God, and twice given in the most solemn manner, shows it to be deserving of our most careful thought.”

Judged by the “facts of Mendelian genetics,” these and other statements to follow could be considered as ludicrous: “Every woman about to become a mother, whatever may be her surroundings, should encourage constantly a happy, cheerful, contented disposition, knowing that for all her efforts in this direction she will be repaid tenfold in the physical, as well as the moral, character of her offspring…” (A Solemn Appeal – 1870), since attitudes and dispositions certainly could not change genetic transmission…or can they?

EG White lived in the midst of change. Between 1893 and 1913, Dr. Franklin Paine Mall collected thousands of fetuses and embryos for scientific study and was instrumental in facilitating another change in the 1920’s. The Victorian idea of moral and character influence of mother-on-child that EGW apparently held, was replaced by a purely physiologic and biologic one in which the mother was primarily a source of nutrition and shelter (a position that she held) for the “independent” fetus (a position that she didn’t.) She declared: “The well-being of the child will be affected by the habits of the mother (Adventist Home p. 255) and

“it is an error generally committed to make no difference in the life of a woman previous to the birth of her children. At this important period the labor of the mother should be lightened. Great changes are going on in her system. It requires a greater amount of blood, and therefore an increase of food of the most nourishing quality to convert into blood. Unless she has an abundant supply of nutritious food, she cannot retain her physical strength, and her offspring is robbed of vitality” (Adventist Home, p.256)

Then in 1953, Watson and Crick sealed the fate of anything other than gene-sequence mutation as a deviation from molecular biologic inheritance. They nailed the lid on the coffin of the notion of inheritance of acquired traits and buried it once and for all.

So what do we do with her statements?

In the face of Mendelian Genetics and the 1953 version of Molecular Biology, her statements do seem ridiculous and have been a source of unspoken inconvenience or embarrassment to Seventh-day Adventist biologists and health scientists. However, new evidence suggests that those judgments might have been premature.

What Yehuda and Seckl observed prior to 9-11 was confirmed in the first stage of their evaluation of the offspring of their special subjects. They studied 200 women, pregnant at the time of the catastrophe, some of whom had actually been in the twin towers at the time of the event. Half of them developed PTSD. Evaluation of these subjects disclosed that they all had abnormal cortisol levels. The striking phenomenon was not just that their babies also had these abnormal levels but that only the babies who were in the third trimester at the time of the trauma were affected. Mothers who had PTSD but were in the first two trimesters of pregnancy had no children who inherited the low cortisol levels. This cannot be just Mendelian genetics at work since the stage of pregnancy would not find an acceptable explanation using the Mendelian model.

The mothers’ experience was having a predictable effect on the offspring’s biochemistry! This can be explained by a down regulation of the genes of the children exposed to high levels of maternal stress hormones in utero, i.e. it could be due to an epigenetic phenomenon. Epigenetics is the study of heritable changes in gene activity that are not caused by changes in the DNA sequence. It refers to functionally relevant changes to the genome that do not involve alteration of the nucleotide sequence.

The work of Yahuda and Sekel is only one of many that substantiate the idea of the epigenetic trans-generational transmission of acquired traits. In another paper, the findings from a cohort of 2414 people, aged 50 years, born as term singletons around the time of the 1944-1945 Dutch famine were published. The authors interviewed 912 and examined 741 of them and found that after exposure to famine in early gestation there was more obesity, altered clotting and blood lipids as well as more coronary heart disease compared to those not exposed to the famine. Interestingly, exposure in mid-gestation was associated with obstructive airways disease and microalbuminuria, and altered glucose tolerance in people exposed to famine in late gestation. Poor nutrition and stress in the mother are associated with significant adverse effects in their offspring, a declaration that is congruent with the statements made in1905.

The work of Lumey and colleagues at the American Health Foundation has adequately shown that, compared to controls, birth weights of first born infants of women prenatally exposed to the Dutch famine winter of 1945 during only the first trimester of pregnancy were significantly heavier (and birth weights of second born infants were significantly lower) than the non-exposed controls. Amazingly, as reported at the annual meeting of The Endocrine Society in June of 2013, Felicia Nowak, Associate Professor of Biomedical Sciences in Ohio University’s Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine, shared evidence that there are a number of mouse traits that may affect metabolism and behavior of offspring that are associated with the pre-conception diet of the father! EG White spoke of the parents, not just the mother!

In the Epigenetics era i.e. “above genetics” we are venturing into the control of genetic expression. Here it seems that EG White may have stated correctly the physiologic issues. But what about her comments about “values” and “character” are they true as well? Professor Jaime Hackett at the University of Cambridge believes that their research is clearly showing that genes can and do retain some memory of their past “experiences.” Some experiences stimulate changes in the attitude of the individual. If, in fact, attitudes and values reflect a person’s own biochemistry, could the associated “hormone soup” also not affect the genome in the same kinds of ways that nutrition, drugs and stress do?

EG White was not unlike her time in some of “her ideas” but deviated quite significantly from contemporary thought in others. She declared: “The basis of a right character in the future man is made firm by habits of strict temperance in the mother prior to the birth of her child…. This lesson should not be regarded with indifference.” (Adventist Home, p. 258) It is interesting to see how “her position” on many of the above issues is now being uncovered by modern science. Who knows what future research will bring.

So, was what she said ridiculous? Or amazing? You decide!