Comment by x0054 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by x0054 | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have access to this paper [1]. The reporting around this paper, and the conclusions reached both by the authors and the media sound ridiculous considering the tiny sample group studied: 32 holocaust surviving parents, 22 children of those parents, and 8 parents / 9 children for control. Variations in such tiny sample groups have to be truly dramatic to be meaningful in any way, and even with dramatic variations you can't possibly make such bold statements as: "This is the first demonstration of transmission of pre-conception parental trauma to child associated with epigenetic changes in both generations."

Now I am not saying that the underlying concept isn't possible. But I feel like this paper isn't properly questioned by the media or the scientific community, because to do so will some how be perceived as antisemitism. It feels wrong to me, I feel like the author is using the horrific events of the Holocaust to promote her scientific career, and that's wrong.

[1] http://www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S0006-322...

It has long been discussed within the Jewish community that lots of children of survivors can be really screwed up - not just their parents.

This sounds like an attempt to examine this to find something other than anecdotal evidence and to see if there is something more going on.

However, so much time has passed, that getting good sample sizes is difficult (i.e. you need parent DNA from living parents as well as child DNA and there are now very few survivors left alive). The DNA science necessary for the study came along too late for there to be a good sample size still available.

The research could have considerable application if it is found to hold true - there are many, many situations where we could be setting up future generations in need of help (e.g. Iraq, Syria to name just 2). If there is a genetic change component, gene therapy applications could be part of a better planned approach to address issues suffered in 20, 30 or more, years time.

> It has long been discussed within the Jewish community that lots of children of survivors can be really screwed up - not just their parents.

Does the Jewish community have any awareness of whether children of survivors who are raised by someone other than the survivors tend to be? In other words, can we (even anecdotally) begin to tease apart inheritance versus environment?

I understand that entirely, but in order to prove biological causation you would have to study much larger groups, and setup your control groups in such a way as to control for the attitudes of affected parents passing there genetic expression to their children through environmental, rather than biological methods. To create an accurate scientifically meaningful study you would want to study 4 groups:

1. Children of affected parents raised by their parents. 2. Children of affected parents raised by someone else, an unaffected relative, for instance. 3. Children of unaffected parents raised by their parents. 4. Children of unaffected parents raised by affected parents.

If you see elevated reaction to stress in groups 1 and 2, but not 3 and 4, then there is a clear biological causation here. However, if you observe elevated reaction to stress in groups 1 and 4, but not 2 and 3, then there could be something environmental going on. Basically, in order to properly help people, we need to first properly identify the problem. For instance, if the problem is biological, then a biological solution in a form of a drug might be effective. However, if the problem is environmental, then psychological help for the prospective parents might be highly effective.

I understand that victims of the Holocaust are very old by now and it's very hard to come up with proper sample groups. However, unfortunately, there are many other horrible instances of inhumane things going on in the world, and many instances of people surviving through those situations. The Rwandan holocaust victims and the survivors of the ethnic cleansing in the balkan states are just two examples, and there are many others, as you have pointed out.

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