Epigentics has to do with gene expression, as opposed to gene alteration. Much of our DNA spends its time silently replicating without actually doing anything remarkable, or even much of anything at all. It’s somewhat analogous to a program that’s been downloaded onto a laptop that the owner has forgotten about. It’s only when someone asks “what’s this?” and double clicks on the icon that we discover what the software does and whether its activation comes with any compatibility issues that might cause us to regret our curiosity later.

Sadly, the event that turns on a formerly silent portion of the genetic code, or turns off a formerly active one, is often a traumatic one of some sort. Indeed, it was a famine that gave epigenetics its first real moment in the scientific spotlight.

During the winter of 1945, the Nazis cut off food supplies to the Dutch to punish them for a railway strike by Dutch workers that had been launched with the intent of interrupting the flow of reinforcements and supplies to the front. By the time the war ended in May of that same year approximately 20,000 people had starved to death in the Netherlands as a result.

In 2013, while reviewing the medical records of 408,015 Dutch males born between 1944 and 1947 and subsequently examined for possible military service at the age of 18, a team of researchers from Columbia University found that men whose mothers had been pregnant with them during the famine of early 1945 were far more likely to suffer a variety of health problems later as adults. As a result, these men experienced a far higher mortality rate than those conceived and born either before the famine or afterwards.

The epidemiologists at Columbia University were only the latest to document significantly greater occurrences of health issues among those in utero during the months known as the Dutch Hunger Winter. Prenatal exposure to malnutrition during that period had already been linked to higher rates of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, pulmonary disease, high blood pressure, and kidney disease to name just a few. Overall, if your mother was pregnant with you in the Netherlands during the winter of 1945, your mortality rate was 10% greater after the age of 68 than those born prior to or conceived following those horrible months.