E. H.: Absolutely not. I have moved to Heidelberg, the headquarters of the EMBL, with six members of my old team at the Institut Curie who accepted to come with me to Germany. By asking me to head this organisation, the committee decided to choose a scientist who is still actively conducting research work and will continue to do so during her term of office, which is renewable every five years. Anyone seriously interested in who we are and how we function should read this book. Peter Forbes, The Guardian E. H.: The EMBL is a flexible, proactive structure that adjusts its research priorities on a regular basis. A new research programme is indeed implemented every five years. The current scheme, which runs until 2021, is called Digital Biology and its focus ranges from the functioning of the single cell to that of the entire organism. Once in Heidelberg, my first task will be to think about the next multiyear programme. This will require considerable diplomacy and consultations with our member countries. I would like to point out that the EMBL is independent from the European Union, and that the UK will continue to be part of it after Brexit. Similarly, the foreign researchers who work at our unit in Hinxton, near Cambridge, will not be affected in any way. Here we briefly focus on two such controversies whose implications appear particularly far-reaching for the strands of sociological inquiry that we pursue in this work.

The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology is Rewriting The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology is Rewriting

Living organisms never fail to amaze me with their ability to utilise raw materials to fuel and facilitate complex life processes. I am looking forward to uncovering these mechanisms in greater detail and investigating how they can be applied during my degree.

Conflict of Interest Statement

Book review – The Age of Mammals: Nature, Development, & Paleontology in the Long NineteenthCentury September 1, 2023 Pulling together the threads of these imbricated, blurred or at times frankly competing understandings of epigenetics, we can thus posit that its current and unifying thrust is, in a nutshell, the promise to capture the analogical vastness of the‘ environmental signals' recounted above through the digital representation of their molecular responses. If what seemed irreducibly analogic (the social, the environmental, the biographical, the idiosyncratically human) needs to be overlaid onto the digital genome of the informationally ripe age in a dyadic flow of reciprocal reactivity, then it seems that this overlay can succeed only once the analogic is interrogated, parsed and cast into genome-friendly, code-compatible digital representations (RNA, DNA found associated to specific chromatin modifications as in chromatin immunoprecipitation or ChIP, methylated DNAs etc.). In this respect, epigenomic profiles (transcriptomes, chromatin maps and the further bits of living matter that technology is progressively digitizing, from proteomes to metabolomes etc.) are increasingly fulfilling, in today's biology, the role that cellular lineages took on in what Morange refers to as the ‘crisis of molecular biology' in the 1970s and 1980s. Following the spectacular dissection of the genetic code, the challenge to explain development in equally molecular and code-compatible terms proved rapidly a major one. As Morange notes,

The Epigenetics Revolution by Nessa Carey – review

a b c d Carey, Nessa (22 January 2017). Junk DNA: A Journey Through the Dark Matter of the Genome. Columbia University Press. ISBN 9780231539418. You are known throughout the world for your work on X chromosome inactivation. Can you explain what this is about? Carey, Nessa (19 February 2015). "The epigenomics roadmap: more exciting than the Genome Project?". BBC World Service Radio . Retrieved 27 January 2017. Her post-doctoral research was in the field of human genetics at the Department of Anatomy, Charing Cross and Westminster Medical School after which she became a lecturer, and then senior lecturer, in molecular biology at Imperial College London, School of Medicine. [9] [10] In 2001 she left academia to work in industry although since 2013 she has been a Visiting Professor in the Department of Surgery and Cancer at Imperial College London [11] in conjunction with her professional career. In subsequent chapters, Carey walks the reader through the many wonderful findings that have emerged from this field. How life experiences, such as a famine, that caused epigenetic changes can resonate down the generations and affect children and grandchildren. How epigenetic markings are wiped almost, but not quite, completely so that a sperm or egg cell, which is very specialised, can again become a completely undifferentiated cell capable of forming all the cells making up the human body. How a cell knows which chromosome came from the father, and which from the mother (and why that matters). How it can offer a mechanism explaining why traumatic childhood events leave a lasting legacy, whether physical or mental. And how understanding epigenetics can offer us a new way to understand and possibly combat diseases such as cancer.

We see at play, in principle but increasingly also in practice, an expansion of the concept of responsibility that reaches well beyond the individual and her direct offspring, fostering the materialization of new bonds among generations. Indeed, precisely this aspect has already triggered the attention of bioethicists and legal scholars in reassessing the inter-generational impact of traumatic social events and forecasting how “Epigenetic effects caused by chemicals and other environmental agents may provide a new source of litigation and liability under the common law. Such litigation, especially when it involves second and third generation effects, would raise a number of novel challenges and issues” ( Rothstein et al, 2009). What is interesting here is how the ideas of natural, normal and pure that have shaped the discourse on the genome as a collective resource in need of protection (as “heritage of humanity” characterized by a natural state, in UNESCO's wording) will map upon the epigenome when it comes to so-called intergenerational equity. We see already glimpses of such a one to one translation, as in the recommendation that “each generation should maintain the quality of the human genome and epigenome and pass it on in no worse condition than the present generation received it” (ibid.). If all our cells contain the same genetic material at the level of the DNA sequence, how then do they acquire such differing characteristics, and how are these retained? In other words, what causes cells to develop into specific types? Why do liver cells produce more liver cells when they divide? What stops neurons from growing in our heart? Much of Carey's book is devoted to answering these questions by drawing on the (relatively) new science of epigenetics. a b Carey, Nessa, ed. (20 November 2015). Epigenetics for Drug Discovery. Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) Publishing. doi: 10.1039/9781782628484. ISBN 9781849738828.

The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology Book review – The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology

Epigenetics has also aroused many fantasies. The notions of reversibility and heritability, in particular, have given rise to a variety of interpretations. Epigenetic marks may be influenced by our environment, the air we breathe or the stress we experience—and transmissible to our children and grandchildren, for example. As a scientist, what is your position on this issue? Molecular epigenetics, the ‘next big thing' in the world of bioscience ( Ebrahim, 2012), is a scientific success story that thrives in the ambiguity of its own definition. As to success, there can be little doubt about it: it is enough to look at the 10-fold increase, over the last decade, in the number of publications carrying ‘epigenetic' in their title ( Haig, 2012). Only in 2011 the figure of publications in the field had reached the astonishing amount of several thousands, possibly up to 20000 depending on the search criteria ( Jirtle, 2012), and at any rate has continued to increase since then. Similar efforts aimed at computing the rise of epigenetics in terms of new networks, institutes, conferences, curricula and journals confirm the vertical growth of the field across the full range of academic indicators. Written in an engaging manner using everyday metaphors to clarify complex concepts and utilizing well–defined diagrams, the author has produced an outstanding book with her wit and expertise. Rita Hoots, NSTA Recommends (National Science Teachers Association)

BOOK REVIEW article

Carey, Nessa (26 February 2015). "Extinctions and the Death of the Human Imagination". The Huffington Post . Retrieved 13 February 2017. From academia to industry with Nessa Carey: Naturejobs Blog". blogs.nature.com . Retrieved 23 January 2017.