Inheritance
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Hey, it's Latif. It's Lulu. This is Radiolab. In a very real way, we've been thinking a lot about inheritance. We inherited this beloved show that we first fell in love with as listeners. And as of 11.01 a.m. on Tuesday when we're recording this, we have not broken the show. So far. Still standing. And we're trying to think about how do we keep it the same in a lot of ways, but how do we also let it grow into something different?

beyond what it was originally built to be. Oh, you said it so much more diplomatically. Like, I'd be like, we got the keys. We're going to trash the house. Well, I mean, you know, yeah. Artfully trash. Artfully trash the house. Anyway, we think about that all the time. And I was just talking a little about that. And then she's like, you know, there's a radio lab about this. A really good radio lab about this.

Called Inheritance. I won't say too much more, except it includes one of my favorite kind of scientific parables that like I've ever heard. It's something I still think about all the time. It's so good that it makes you not want to trash the house. You know what I mean? Yeah, that's it. Yeah, there you go. And we'll just let the old yahoos from whom we inherited it take it away. Enjoy.

Oh, actually, real thing, before we go, Latif. Yeah. Did you know there is, a part of this show is going to be like crazy breaking news, like happened yesterday and we already have a deep take on it? No, I did not know that. April Fools. Oh, great. All right, Kay. Yep. I want to start with Ape.

parental daydream for a second. It's an idea that's been kicking around for me since my kids were born. Okay. Actually, the idea itself is pretty old. It goes back to the 1800s. Right around Napoleon's time. To a fellow by the name of Jean-Baptiste Pierre-Antoine Monet-Chevalier de Lamarck. Yep, Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Who, according to writer Sam Kean... He was really one of the first grand theorists in biology.

He actually coined the word biology, too. Really? Yep. His big idea, as you might know, is that what a person does in their lifetime could be directly passed to their kids. Very easily. His famous example was giraffes. Lamarck said, you want to know how a giraffe got its long neck? Mm-hmm.

One day this giraffe, mother giraffe, let's say, was looking up at a tree and saw some fruit and had to stretch her neck and stretch again. Whole lifetime of stretching. And then when she had a baby, stretching got into the baby. And then that baby would stretch and stretch and stretch and give a little more stretching to its baby. And eventually, over the millennia, what you'd get is a creature with a very long neck. Because they're reaching for the tops of trees.

It makes a kind of common sense, really. It does. It does make kind of a folk sense. He thought it worked with humans, too. His example with humans was a blacksmith. He thought that because they're swinging hammers all day, they got big bulky muscles and then they would pass the muscles to their children. The sneaky idea here is that

The blacksmiths, the giraffes, they made it happen. They willed the neck to get longer, the muscles to get bigger. And the key point is that it wasn't something inborn in them. It was something they acquired during their lifetime. Which they passed to their kids. Right. And that's wrong. That's not how it works. We now know that that's not the case. But wouldn't it be nice if that's how it worked?

Let's read the book first. Read this. Because, you know, now that I've got these two kids, right? Yeah. Do you see the owl? I find myself thinking, like, okay, I know these kids have their genes, half for me, half for my wife. And I know I can't change those genes. And I know fate is going to give them a couple of random mutations in those genes that I have no control over. That is just a cold logic of Darwinian evolution. Yeah. Well, it's offensive. I mean, the idea that they could be constrained by their DNA...

that maybe one of us gave them a bit of DNA that's gonna hold them back? It's a terrible thought! And so what you do...

I think all parents do this, is that you slip into this Lamarckian delusion that what you do with your kids could somehow rewrite all that. That you can somehow, by just being nice to them, reading them stories or whatever, that you could somehow break them free of all that. Rewrite their blueprint? I don't know. You don't really say it to yourself that way, but yeah. You can make a deep difference. Yeah, like you can help them overcome you. Is that cool? I don't know. You can't. I know. That's what Darwin says. You can't. I know.

I know. Once they're born, their genes are fixed. And change does not happen in a generation or two. It happens really, really, really slowly. Gradually, achingly slowly. One parent stretching isn't going to do anything. See, that's the bummer of Darwinian evolution. As a parent, you are a tiny blip in a very, very long story.

This hour, we're going to fight this sort of sad sack feeling of inevitability and impotence and rewrite the so-called rules of genetics. That's right. Today on Radiolab, we're going to lick some rats, starve some Swedes, pay some people to change destiny. I mean, we're not going to do that ourselves, but we're going to play you stories where these things actually happen. Yes. I'm Chad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krolwich. This is Radiolab. Stick around. It's going to get messy.

Okay, so let's get going and stick with your boy Lamarck just for a second. Because we were talking to science writer Carl Zimmer, and he told us that back in the early 1900s, this tension between Lamarck and Darwin got extra tense. Yeah. In a sort of fascinating way. Right. And it all started in Vienna at this really marvelous place called the Vivarium. ♪

The vivarium. Yeah. This was a really radical place at the time because you have to remember that people studying animals up till now, they were basically, you know, studying preserved specimens and so on. At the vivarium, as the name suggests, they had live animals. This was like a zoo, basically. Well, it was a zoo where there was all sorts of experiments going on. You know, the fact is that taking care of animals, trying to keep them alive in a building is not an easy thing, especially if it's 1903. ♪

But luckily for the vivarium and for our story, they had a guy. Paul Kammerer. Who was he? And when was he? He was born in 1880 in Vienna. Jewish family. By all accounts, a pretty good-looking guy. In pictures, he has that crazy Einstein fuzzy hair thing. The genius cut? Yep. He's 22, 23, and he already had this reputation for being amazing at keeping animals alive that otherwise would just die. ♪

His reputation was that he could get inside the mind of, say, a salamander and know just what it wanted to eat. Or how much humidity it preferred. Right. He was a born nurturer and he adored animals. He actually named his daughter Lacerta, which is a genus of lizard. That's the kind of guy he is. So, of course, the folks at the vivarium asked him... To build these terrariums and aquariums and stock them with animals. Including...

A particular amphibian that plays a very big part in the story. The midwife toad. The midwife toad. Right. That's writer Sam Keen again, and here's, he says, what you need to know about the midwife toad. Basically, the midwife toad has a strange habit for toads. Most toads, he says, love to stay in the water. They like to hang out in the water, and the females like to lay eggs in the water. But with the midwife toad, the female lays her eggs on land, and then the male midwife toad

comes along, grabs the eggs, and actually kind of sticks them to his back legs like a bunch of whitish grapes and then hops around with them

Basically until they hatch. So he's got to live his life as a toad with all this baggage on him? Just until they hatch and then until they go off. Still, that's a burden. He's carrying a big burden there. Is your wife going to hear this? She carries your kids for nine months and you're like, that poor male toad. Anyhow, so you got this guy, Paul Kemmerer, who's good with animals. You got these toads who hate water. And one day we can imagine...

He gets curious. As he's doing his rounds, he stops by the midwife toad terrarium. He looks down at that little male toad with the grapes stuck to his legs, and he wonders, how adaptable is that little guy? I mean, he hates water. Females seem to hate laying eggs in the water, but is that the end of the story? What would happen if I made them go in the water? Could they adapt? I know what I'll do. I'm going to set up a terrarium for them, and I'm going to make it hot. Really uncomfortably hot.

But I'm gonna give him a basin of water. Nice cool water. And he would basically turn the heat way, way up in these aquariums until they had to go underwater. You can imagine these toads were like, "Dammit. Fine, alright, I'll get in the water." Maybe they'd try and jump back out, but it was still hot so they'd have to jump back in. And since the camera kept the heat up, toads basically had to stay there in this watery place

that they had not evolved for. Darwin's theory would have said, you know, 90% of the toads are going to die. There's going to be this massacre of toads, and only a few lucky ones are going to survive. And those lucky ones, according to Darwin's theory, they would have had to have been born with some random mutation in their genes. That gave them an advantage in this situation. And that advantage, whatever it was,

Because it starts with one individual, and then it gets passed on to the kids, and then on to their kids. It would take a long, long, long time to spread through the whole population. Because generally, that's how evolution works. It takes a while. But according to Kammerer, here's what happened when he heated up the toad's little cage. They spend more time in the water.

As expected. And when it came time to mate, the males and the females, they would mate in the water. At first, didn't go so well. Because, you know, if you're a land toad and you're trying to have sex in the water, it's kind of hard. You're slippery, your partner's slippery. You just haven't evolved for this and there's no way you can. At least not quickly. But, according to camera, shortly after these toads got into the water, they did begin to evolve. Fast. Fast.

They began to grow these little puffy things on their hands. These kind of rough, scratchy pads. What's known as a nuptial pad. Nuptial pads. Right. It was just what the males needed. So they can grab onto the female and hold tight while they're mating. And they didn't have these on land? No, they did not have them on land. They disappeared in the water. Yep. And how long did it take? Right away. Really? In just two generations.

These toads seem to have done something that should have taken, I don't know, 50, 100 generations, maybe more. And Cameron thought, wow, they can respond to the environment. He was revealing it with experiments. They're not trapped by their genes. Around 1908, he starts publishing all of these results. And it's big news. And...

He grabbed his toads and he hit the road. He hit the lecture circuit and he hit it big. He was known for going around and giving what he called his big show lectures where he would wow whole audiences of people. And in 1923, he actually comes to England. There's a newspaper called the Daily Express and they have these headlines that come out. It says, Race of Supermen.

That's the headline for his talk. And then right below the headline it says, Scientists' Great Discovery Which May Change Us All. What's he talking about? We're just talking about Toad, I thought. He's not just talking about Toads anymore. He's going way beyond Toads. He extended this idea to people. He thought that you could kind of engineer societies by changing the environment. I just have to read this to you. The results make it probable that our descendants will learn more quickly what we know well.

We'll execute more easily what we have accomplished with great effort. We'll be able to withstand what injured us almost to the point of death where we sought, they will find. Where we began, they will accomplish.

And this idea won him a lot of fans, including, not surprisingly, the Soviets. Yeah, it was a very attractive theory to them in Moscow. Because the Soviets, they believed in Karl Marx's idea that human beings were an improvable species. If you can change the conditions around people, you change the people. And here Kammerer was saying, you know, you can do this even on a physical level. But...

You know, there are a lot of skeptics. And there were from the beginning. When Kammerer published his results initially, a bunch of scientists immediately began to say, Wait a minute.

Hold on here. It would be nice if life was like that, but life isn't like that. Life is hard. People can't just will themselves into a more perfect form. According to Darwin, life and changes are ruled by chance. And fate. And to believe anything else, that's naive. So this whole toad thing, to the Darwinian faction, it didn't scan really. So some scientists began to ask Hammer if they could look at his toads. You know, just...

take a little peek for themselves. And every time... Kammerer said no. They were his specimens. Get your own. It was kind of this struggle for a few years. Then World War I came and that kind of disrupted everything. Kammerer, for one, was sent off to work as a censor for the Austrian military. And his lab ended up getting destroyed. Including all his toads. Except he had one.

He had one remaining midwife toad. So this whole debate, two totally different ways of seeing life. It all came down to this jar with this toad in it. And you have to bear in mind that at this point, it only had one hand left. The right hand had been cut off for microscopic slides. And so you could only see one nuptial pad. And it all comes down to this. And...

All of it was just about to fall apart. What happened? Well, there was an expert on reptiles named G. Kingsley Noble. Gladwin Kingsley Noble. What a name. I kind of like this guy. Sounds like trouble. He was for Cammerer. He was mighty skeptical. So he actually went to Vienna. Visited Cammerer's lab when Cammerer wasn't there. And he makes a very careful study of this reptile.

And when he examined it, he noticed that there was a syringe hole there. And he says, this isn't a nuptial pad. It looks darkened, but that's just ink. What? What do you mean ink? Ink. Like squid ink? No, like India ink. What? No. Yes. He doctored the toad. That was the implication. Except...

Kammerer tried to defend himself by saying, Do you think I'm a dumkop or an idiot? Because that's what I would have to be if I left a forgery with ink standing around openly in the laboratory where so many of my enemies would have entry. So how did he explain it? Well, he thought it might have been an assistant trying to frame him because he was Jewish. And, you know, there was kind of anti-Semitism growing at this time. So he thought that someone had framed him. And...

Six weeks after Noble published his results in Nature, Kammerer sent a letter to Moscow. Turning down a job that they'd offered him. Because it would reflect badly on the Soviet state. And then... Following day... Kammerer puts on a suit. He walks off into the mountains. Outside Vienna on a rocky mountain trail. And he shoots himself. Jeez. Lamarckism pretty much died.

So then over the next 70 some odd years, Lamarck basically became the poster boy for like the big dumb idea. The idea that you want to believe in, but that you know isn't true. But there's like some hope here because... Okay. All right. This is interesting. Then Carl told us about this research that showed... That if...

If a mother... Well, he couldn't quite remember the details. Does what a mother... Unusual for Carl. Mouse or rat? I'm trying to remember. Was it rats or mice? No, it was rats. Rats. Yep. We ended up talking to the guy who did the work. Michael Meaney, I think? Yep. A professor in the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University in Montreal. So here's the backstory. ♪

About 30 years ago, I was an undergraduate student. Michael was in school and he got interested in a very, very basic question about how things get passed down. Like, have you ever had one of those moments where you suddenly are your dad and it catches you off guard? Oh, of course. I mean, it's pretty common. But like, here's a for instance. My dad, for my entire life, had this thing where if someone was whistling, he'd just, he would, like, they could be whistling six tables over in a restaurant and he would turn around and be like,

Stop that. Like it was like it was scraping his very nerves. And the other day someone was whistling and I was like, stop it. And it just hit me. I was like, oh, God, that was him. It's never appeared until now. And you wonder, like, where did that come from? Is that a genetic hatred of whistling that I just had? Or did I somehow learn that? That in a sort of ass backward way was Michael's question. How does that happen? How do these simple little traits get passed forward?

So we started looking at maternal care. Many years later, he and this woman, Frances Champagne, who now works at Columbia University, they decided to explore this question in rats. So we have our rats in the lab. They thought, let's just see if we can figure out how it is that rat mothers pass down their parenting skills. That's right. If you were a great rat mommy, what would you be doing with your rat babies? You would be licking them quite a lot.

That's what good rat mothers do. They lick their babies a lot. But she says you can tell right away just by looking that some rat moms don't lick their kids a lot. There's a normal distribution, right? You got your good parents and your bad parents. What they decided to do first was to try to figure out which rat was which, which meant...

Interestingly, counting all the licks. Putting this into context, you know, you have a rat mom and they have about 16 to 20 babies. All at once? At once. And we're watching 40 litters at a time. How do you count the licks? That's too hard. You have to look at one cage, say, are they licking? Yes, no. Okay, move on to the next cage. Yes, no.

Move on to the next cage. Yes, no. You have to do that for five hours a day for six consecutive days. Move on to the next cage. Yes, no. Move on to the next cage. Yes, no.

See, this is the story of science that doesn't get told. It's just mind-crushing tedium. Yes, yeah. Yeah, it drifts into something like a shopping channel. In any case, what they saw at the end of all this counting was... Well, first of all, what they saw was this pattern that rat pups who got licked a lot as babies when they grew up, they licked their babies a lot. And the rat pups who didn't get licked a lot when they grew up,

they didn't lick their babies a lot. So the great rat nightmare comes true where the females become their mothers. Okay. I think that makes a lot of sense. Actually, it's kind of obvious. Right. Yeah. I mean, we all kind of know this, that there are cycles of abuse or whatever. You know, like if you're abused as a kid, you're more likely to abuse your kid. But still, you got to wonder. Why? Why?

Why would that happen? How do those cycles perpetuate? I mean, like with the licking, is it a teaching thing where, you know, the babies become good mothers because they've learned it by watching their mothers. They've seen it and they've repeated the experience. Or does it get passed on such a deep level that it doesn't even require teaching?

What do you mean? So that's the reason, of course, that we work with rats, because we can get inside the brain. So Michael and Francis looked inside the brains of these rats, and what they saw was that the rats who'd been licked a lot as babies, they had more stuff in their head. What do you mean? More brain cells? More what kind of stuff? No, not brain cells. More of this particular kind of protein. That activates maternal behavior. When rats have more of this protein, they will act more motherly, and they had more. So...

Well, think about what makes proteins. DNA! Well, yes, genes and DNA, yes. Don't you see somehow the mother's tongue is getting all the way down in there and going... and messing with the baby's DNA? Is that what you're saying? That the licking is changing the baby's DNA? That's what I... No! I'm not quite saying that. You can't! That's against the rules. That's against the rules. You can't change your DNA. Yeah, you can't touch that. It's off limits. But that tongue is doing something to the DNA.

So what is the licking doing then? That's our challenge. Do you have any theories for how this tongue is tickling the DNA or whatever it's doing? Ah, well... And then Michael just launched into this thing. What happens when moms lick their pups is that the pup becomes aroused.

The reason they're more aroused is that the mom's licking activates the release of adrenaline and noradrenaline in the pup. He says those two chemicals kick off certain hormonal systems. And one of them is called the thyroid system. Thyroid hormones then get into the brain and they turn on certain neurochemical signals. And the neurochemical signal that gets activated during licking is serotonin.

As in the mood chemical? Yep. So mom's licking activates serotonin and it's released onto brain cells in the hippocampus. You still with me? I think I'm with you. We started with the tongue. Four or five steps later, we are in brain cells. So almost instantaneously, the mother's tongue has reached into the baby's brain cells. Hmm.

Now, inside these cells in the center, coiled up in little spools, is the DNA. So we're getting close to the moment of truth because there it is. That's the stuff that makes you you but that you supposedly can't get to. But here's what I did not know about DNA. According to Francis, it's not just sitting off there perfectly preserved. It's in the middle of the cell. It's crowded. You know, you've got all these chemicals around. Racing by. You know, in the cells. And very often, one of them will just go crashing into the DNA. Okay.

And it'll stick there like a barnacle or a glob of peanut butter. Exactly, peanut butter. There we go. What'll happen is it'll get stuck to one little part of the DNA. And now that little bit of DNA... Is very difficult to get at. It's basically unusable. Because it's got the thing stuck to it? Yeah.

And these things are called, apparently, methyl groups. Methyl groups are pretty sticky. They're hard to get off. So imagine the DNA in that brain cell. All these chemicals are racing by, crashing into it, sticking. And one of the bits that gets covered up is that little bit that makes the proteins that create a maternal instinct.

The bit of DNA that will give this baby, when it grows up, the instincts to be nice to its baby and lick that baby. And you're saying that part of the DNA is covered up? Yes. And when methyl groups stick to that part of the DNA, the maternal instinct is effectively turned off. But if you've got a mom who licks you... Mom's licking activates serotonin. Serotonin gets into the brain cells and, according to Michael, unleashes... A whole series of molecular events inside the cell.

The critical part of this is that all these changes wake up this little gang of proteins known as transcription factors. And if they see methyl groups sitting on that bit of DNA, they are pissed. And so they bring a lot of friends to the party. They all go down to the DNA, surround that methyl, and just knock it right off the DNA. That's it. And then they're going to basically revel at that particular spot.

and turn on that gene. So now the genes can make the proteins that make the rats a good mom? Exactly. Exactly. F***, that was awesome. Wow. That was amazing. Why are you so thrilled? Well, think about it. This is nature and nurture slamming into each other. Like, you know when smart people say, you know, there's no such thing as nature and nurture. It's only the interaction of the two. And you're like, what the hell does that mean?

Well, this is it. This is real physical, chemical interaction between what's going on in the environment and what's going on with the DNA. Because you begin with a mother's lick that ends up with a deep, deep change in the baby. Not just a good, warm, fuzzy feeling, but a fundamental shift in who that baby is and who that baby will be. You're now hearing Lamarck's name invoked.

these days because there are things beyond genes that we pass down to our children. Now, according to Carl, your genes are still fixed. We can't rewrite our genes. That is impossible so far as we know. But there seems to be this layer on top of the genes. This second channel of heredity. If the genes are the bottom floor, then this layer on top is sometimes called the epigenome. And that thing can change based on your experiences. Which when you think about it,

that has a very Lamarckian flavor. Yeah. I think that's where Lamarck's ideas can be woven in and make some sense. So do you call yourself a Lamarckian? Not usually because it upsets people. And I'm Canadian. I don't like to upset people. Plus, you know, Lamarck didn't get all the biological details right. He had no idea about DNA. Or very many of them right at all. But, you know, his basic idea seems to be true. I mean, when you think of Kammerer, there was a report in Science...

outlining a theory about how cameras toads got these characteristics that invoked these epigenetic inheritance and imprinted genes. And it made it plausible. Oh, so redeeming him. Yeah. Maybe or maybe not.

Thanks to Francis Champagne and Michael Meany and Sam Kean, who writes about Paul Kammerer in his book, The Violinist's Thumb. Also, thanks to Carl Zimmer, whose latest is Evolution, Making Sense of Life.

And go. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krulwich. This is Radiolab. And today... It's Inheritance today. Yeah, we're exploring questions of like, what can you pass down to your kids and their kids? What can't you? How much of you will echo into the future? And how much of you won't? And I gotta say...

I'm feeling pretty good about this show so far. Because? Well, if a mother, a rat mother, licking her baby can have such a profound effect, basically change the expression of the genes in the baby, well, that's hopeful. So you think you can get deep down? Look, in the end, what do I know? But I take it that we have more control over our destinies and our kids' destinies than we would have thought. Well, let's not get too excited too fast because...

We have a story to tell, and this one, this tale leaves me a little queasy. Oh, there was a contact. Hello, hello. Yep, it's me, Ole. This is Ulla. Hi, Ole Bygren. I'm in public health. He works at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, where he studies population data. Looking for patterns in cardiovascular diseases, high blood pressure and such. But the story he told us begins around 25 years ago. Way up in northern Sweden.

That's Sam Kean again. He's the guy who told us about Oda's work. In a little community called Overkalix. What does it look like? Is it a big town, a little village? It's a small forest area, very beautiful. But this was a really, really tough place to grow up.

Very isolated and very... Cold. Are you near the Arctic Circle? North of it. North of the Arctic Circle? Yeah. My home village was 10 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Oh, so you grew up over Calix. Yeah, yeah. We had an expression here, dig where you stand. And it just so happens this town is a perfect place to dig. I'm here. Viksarkivet.

The Kingdom Archive. Because there is more data, more information about the people of Overcalix going farther back into the past than you could find almost anywhere else on Earth. Yeah, we are really data rich. This is the Overcalix church parish record. Yes, it is. Because here's the thing, the churches up in Overcalix kept incredibly detailed records. We actually sent our friend Pike Malinowski to the archives in Stockholm to check it out. It says, register.

In those books, you can read everything about the citizens of Overcalix going back hundreds of years. What's his name? You know, their names. Jöns. Jöns Olof. Anna Kajsa. Henrik Vennberg. What year they were born? 1814. 1881. She was born 1904, and this is... Everything happening in the family... Is in these books. Nilsson. He was an idiot. He was an idiot. He was an idiot.

What does that mean, he was an idiot? Yeah, he was, you know, retarded. He was miserable to look at. It's not very politically correct, huh? No. In any case, these books tell you when each of these folks died, how they died. From disease. Heart disease. From pneumonia. Alright.

Accidents. She drowned. Oh my God. A lot of diagnosis, actually. Influenza. Cancer. Heart disease. Brain disease. Interestingly, the churches also kept track of the farmers' crops. Crops and livestock. How much they were growing each year. Which turned out to be kind of an interesting thing to look at because... The people in Overcalix who were farming... Trying to eke a living out of the soil. And here we have a...

How much they harvested. They would experience these wild changes from harvest to harvest. What you see in the records is that one year... Potatoes. Crops would do great. A hundred liters. Wow, that's a lot of potatoes. A few years later, there'd be a harsh winter. The crops failed. And when the crops failed... Famines. Yeah. So sad. They'd basically starve.

I mean, when you look at the records, you don't see huge spikes in mortality. So they didn't starve to death. But they suddenly had to get by on a tiny fraction of the food that they were used to. They didn't have grains. I mean, they didn't have porridge. And so they just had to hold on for the entire winter. But then, a few years would pass. Crops would bounce back. But we have a lot more grain here, I think. And suddenly... Plenty of food. They could eat twice, three times as much.

But then... Oh no. Total crop failure. Famine again. And these changes would just bounce back and forth. Feast. Famine. Feast. Famine. Feast again. And looking at these swings in fortune, Ula realized what he had here was a nice, natural experiment. Because with all this data, he and his team could follow families forward in time through the generations.

So if they saw somebody who was starving as a kid in 1820, they could then see, well, when those people had children and grandchildren, did anything change? Were there any consequences? They wanted to see basically the effects of starvation on multiple generations. What did you discover? Well, it was a very interesting discovery. That's a little odd, actually. Here's what Ula says he found in the data.

If you were a boy in over calyx between the ages of 9 and 12 years old, so that's the window, 9 to 12, you're a boy, and then we have one of those terribly rough winters and you're eating much less than normal. Assuming that you can survive the ordeal and you grow up and you have kids of your own, the data seems to say that your kids...

will benefit from your suffering. Yeah, yeah. They'll do better? If you have a starving daddy, it turns out that the baby actually gets some sort of health benefit. Really? Yeah. And these effects, in fact, were so strong that you could trace it to the grandfather.

The grandfather? Two generations? It seemed to have been passed down from multiple generations. You mean if you had a starving grandfather, you would be a healthier boy because you had a starving grandfather? You got a health boost if you had a starving grandfather.

What sort of health boosts? Well... Ulla told us, take heart disease. He said, if you were a boy and you starved between the ages of 9 and 12, and then you went on to become a father, then a grandfather, your grandkids... They were protected. Meaning that they had less incidence of heart disease? Much less. How much less? Well, it's one-fourth, then, can we say. One-fourth?

Fourth? Let me say this again. If you're a starving boy between 9 to 12 years old, now it doesn't matter a whole lot what happens to you after this, your grandchildren will have one quarter the risk of heart disease than if you were eating a whole lot between 9 and 12. One quarter. Not only that, apparently those grandkids...

were less prone to diabetes. They lived longer lives, something like 30 years on average. This was a really, really big effect. Instead of dying at 40, I'd live to 70? That kind of 30 years? Yes, exactly.

I wonder, it's such a surprising result. I wonder how much you believe in it. The results are there. It's only the mechanisms are not so clear. But the results are very clear. The results are obvious to you. The results are quite obvious. Just to be sure, we asked Frances Champagne what she thinks of this data. I believe it. Oh, you do?

And Michael Meany as well. I think the Swedish data are really, really strong and very reliable. Everybody we talk to seems to think there's something really interesting going on here. But what exactly, maybe you can explain this to me, Robert, what exactly happens between 9 to 12 that makes this big difference? Well, so here's the thing.

How old are your boys right now? Three and eight months. Okay. So here's what you're going to notice. Your boys will first grow taller and taller for the next few years. And when they get to be about nine, ten years old, they're going to stop growing just for a few years. This is what's called the slow growth period. Just for those years, that's nine, ten, eleven. Just before puberty. They won't grow much on the outside, but on the inside...

That is the time when the sperms are developing. What's happening during this time is that you're setting aside the stock of cells that you're going to draw on in the future to make sperm cells. So they are pre-sperms. So the thought is when those little boys in Overcalix were really, really hungry, their hunger started a chemical process...

that reached all the way down to the DNA inside the boy's sperm. Something happens on the molecular level.

What exactly? Well, the DNA, the RNA, microRNAs, histone. Wait, you're just renaming it. Methylations, phosphorylations, and so on. This is just judo. That's all this is. Truth is, we don't know precisely how this happens, but somehow the experience of starvation marks the DNA. Maybe like those methyl things we were telling you about with the rats, telling some genes to turn off now, other genes to turn on.

And the incredible thing is, those marks stick around. The sperm carries these marks to the next generation. And then the next one after that. Right. So somehow, by some kind of chemical mechanism, starving grandpa, back when he was about 9 to 12 years old, turned out to be a good thing. So it's like...

Grandpa's struggle is sort of jumping forward and giving me a leg up. Well, that's the good news. But unfortunately, there is some bad news here. Yeah. If your grandpa didn't starve, instead he lived through great times. He stuffed himself silly 9, 10, 11 years old. So he's a happy grandpa. You, the grandson, you then would have... High frequencies of heart attacks.

As to diabetes, it was a fourfold risk. Fourfold? Fourfold? 400% greater? Yeah.

I got to say, this is spooky. This is spooky because it's like- It does get- Yeah. It's like, what if grandpa has a bad day? Suddenly you're marked. Yeah. Frankly, this makes being nine, 10, 11, 12 a rather crucial- And at a time when you're not making the best decisions anyway. Yeah, because grandpa's just nine. I should add too, they have found very similar effects for smoking, for instance. If you start smoking when you're 10, 11, something like that, you're-

you end up having children with more problems. I initially felt very hopeful and excited about this research because it seems to suggest that a body, one body can respond to an environment and change and be flexible in a way we didn't think was possible.

But this stuff you're telling me about Sweden feels very grim in a certain way. Although, you know, sometimes your grandfather's suffering helps you. Even if it helps, it's horrifying. It makes me claustrophobic. You feel kind of hemmed in by what your grandfather did? A little bit. I guess the way I would look at it is that you can change your environment a lot more easily than you can change your genes. I think what's weird here is that

is that we started trying to make a difference in our children, and now we're surprise attacked by our grandparents. I'll tell you what I'm going to do, though. When Emil gets to be eight, I'm cutting him off. He's not eating at all. This may hurt you, my son, but I'm doing it for my grandchildren.

Thanks to Ulla Bigrian, reporter Pike Malinowski and... Karin Borgqvist-Jung, and I'm a senior archivist at the National Archive in Marieberg in Stockholm.

Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krolwicz. This is Radiolab, and today... Inheritance, what you can move on to the next generation and what you can't. Now, the Sweden story from our last segment left us both feeling a little strange. Yeah. Because while you might have a lot of influence, you know, genetically speaking, over your kids and their kids, you don't seem to have a lot of control. No. So we're going to leave you with a story from our producer Pat Walters about one woman's radical... Even troubling. ...attempt to regain that control.

A few months ago, Pat made his way down to North Carolina, to a small suburb outside of Charlotte, to visit this family. Mamaw's the one I'd come to see. She and I snuck away from the children into our office. Well, I guess, um, I was thinking we could just start at the beginning. That's fine. What year was it? Where were you? Oh, okay, um...

1989. So this is Barbara. Barbara Harris. I'm the founder and director of Project Prevention. And in 1989, when the story we're telling now started, she was living in California, in Orange County. And I was a waitress. I worked for IHOP for over 30 years. And she was a mom, too. Six sons. She and her husband. Smitty. Harris. What do you do for a living? Smitty.

Six boys is a lot of boys. But at that point, just two of the six boys were living at home, Brian and Rodney. They were seven and eight at the time. And Barbara found herself returning to a thought she'd kind of always had. She started to wish again that she could have a daughter. Yeah. And by this point, she's 37 years old. And I knew the only way I was going to get a daughter was if I went and became a foster parent and asked for one.

So she did. She filled out the forms, went through all the training that we had to do and first aid and fingerprinted and had a background check done. And then they waited for the call. I already knew that if I ever got a little girl, I was going to name her Destiny. And that summer, it was July. They got the call. I had asked for a newborn. So when the social worker called me, she said, I have this

cute little baby girl for you, but she's eight months old. Is that too old? And I said, no, no, that's okay. She said, well, she's just beautiful and she has lips like a baby doll. That's what I remember her saying. So Barbara and her son got in the car and drove across town to the foster home where Destiny had been living for the past eight months. Since birth, we went to the foster home and went in. The lady knew why we were there and Destiny was in the other room, like sleeping or something. I'm not sure.

So we talked to her for a little while. At a certain point, the social worker pulls out a stack of papers. With a child, they give you a whole folder full of information, tells you all about them. And she told Barbara, there's something you need to know about this baby. She's born and tested positive for PCP crack and heroin. And, um...

Doctors would later explain to Barbara that Destiny's mom had been addicted to drugs while she was pregnant. And the psychologist who gave Destiny her first checkup told Barbara that she was delayed and she was always going to be delayed because of her prenatal neglect. Did that scare you at all? I mean, that seems like a thing that would be kind of frightening. No, it didn't scare me. Because she says as soon as she saw Destiny... And sat her in my lap.

with her little dress on and her little curly hair. She just knew, this is my daughter. A couple of days later, I had already bonded with her so much it was as if I gave birth to her. Honestly, I think it never seemed like she was anything but my real mom, if that makes sense. This, of course, is Destiny. She's 22 now, and she's never even met her birth mom. No. No.

No. Barbara says they've reached out to her many times, but they never heard back. And Destiny says she doesn't really care. I mean... At all. I got these jeans from somewhere, but I kind of feel like she was a surrogate. Like, she carried me for my real mom. That's how I've always looked at it. You know, my mom needed a girl, and...

She got one. It's just, that's just how I've always looked at it. And even though they look basically nothing alike, I mean, for one thing, Barbara's white and Destiny's black, they both say that they actually often forget that they're not biologically related. They told me a bunch of these stories. One of them involving, well... So I don't have the biggest boobies in the world.

You can't see that on the radio, but hey, it's a fact of life. And Destiny says one day she and her mom were in the car and her mom said... She said, I don't know, you know, maybe, I mean, maybe they'll grow bigger, like mine are bigger, you know. And then she goes, oh wait, I didn't give birth to you, that doesn't matter. Never mind, you're stuck with small boobies. Okay, now I just had to accept it.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves here because the event that really sets this story in motion, the set of events, happened a few months after Barbara had brought Destiny home. When they got another call from a social worker saying that same mother, Destiny's birth mother, had given birth to another child. Yeah, the social worker called and told me the mother had given birth. Birth mother's name was actually the same as me.

So Barbara. Really? Yeah. She has the same name as me. So she told me Barbara had had another baby and... A boy. Did we want it. So I went to the hospital and picked him up. You picked him up right from the hospital? Yeah. And as soon as she got there to pick him up, she could tell that something was wrong. He wasn't a little happy baby. Because when a woman uses heroin while she's pregnant, the fetus gets hooked on it too. So for Isaiah, being born was like just being cut off.

And he was going through withdrawal. Light bothered him. Noise bothered him. Eyes that beat it out. This is Smitty again. Projectile, vomiting. Because he couldn't hold formula down. He'd fall asleep and just wake up screaming. He was just never, you know, most babies are kind of peaceful. He was never really peaceful. And day after day. Literally for months. Isaiah would sleep and he would scream. That was it. It was just...

No baby should have to come into the world like that. Nobody has a right to do that to a baby. But a year later, the social worker called again. Saying the mother had given birth to a baby girl. Did we want her? This is the same birth mother? Yeah. And again, Barbara thinks, come on.

But if this little girl is here, she should be with her brother and sister. And so she should be with me. And I called my husband again at work and said, they want to know if we want to take the baby. And he said, Barbara, I'm not buying a school bus because we had already had to upgrade from a car to a van, from a condo to a home. And so I said, OK, well, this will be the last one. We'll just get one more. But a year later, she gets another call.

another little boy. That's how we ended up with four of them. These are four kids from the same birth mother. Yeah. Wow. So...

By now, it's 1994, and Barbara is thinking, I just don't get it. You know, like, how did this happen? How was this woman allowed? To walk into the hospital and drop off a damaged baby and just walk away with no consequences. Over and over again. How dare you do this? The way she saw it, the state, the federal government, somebody. Should say, you're not doing this. You're not leaving this hospital unless you have long-term birth control. Barbara tried to get a law passed requiring just that.

But it failed. And when I found out the bill didn't pass, I just thought I have to come up with something else. I have to be creative. And she says one day this idea just came to her. She was thinking... Everybody's motivated by money. So... Can I offer these women money to use birth control? In other words, could I pay women who have drug problems to stop having babies?

I decided to have a press conference in my front yard to announce what I was doing. And my naive mind, I didn't have a clue what a big deal this was.

The story exploded. Barbara Harris' solution is simpler than anything else out there. Instantly. She's offering $200. $200. $200. It's $300 now. To any drug-addicted woman who will agree to have no more babies. I'm going to go out into the streets and offer addicted women money to use birth control. This could mean sterilization. It could mean getting an IUD. Like, she gives the woman a choice. If

You've already had a kid. You can be sterilized. And if you haven't, you can choose to have an IUD or an implant put in, which will last for several years. Wait, when you say they can choose to be sterilized, you mean permanent? Yeah, permanent. Like, tubes tied. Whoa. Sounds bizarre, but it's a solution. Harris says her program, Children Requiring a Caring Community, or CRAC, can prevent thousands of unwanted births to drug-addicted women. I'd like everybody to meet, please, Barbara Harris. Please welcome Barbara.

As Barbara made the rounds on the daytime talk shows, the reaction was split right down the middle. On the one hand, she says, immediately, checks started arriving. This is 25, this is 50. From all over the country. This is 750 and this is 200. All over the political spectrum, from Hollywood lefties to social conservatives. We've together pledged more than $150,000 to her program. And that number, by the way, has grown a lot. Is that one million? Yeah.

Yeah. Over the past five years, if you look at her tax return. Wow. But along with the support came a tax.

particularly as drug-addicted women began to sign up. Barbara Harris says she's convinced more than a dozen women, 14 women, 45 women have accepted her offer to be sterilized in return for money. Right away, people accused her of targeting women at their weakest moment and enabling their drug abuse. You know what they're going to go do with that money. You give them $200 each, which they can spend on crack. That's their choice, but the babies don't have a choice. Barbara started finding herself on panels with women who'd used drugs during their pregnancies. You know what you should have.

And that's when things would start to get out of control. I feel that they should all be sterilized. Sterilized? Like you said, when you were in your addiction like she is, I didn't say I'm God. She asked my opinion and that's what I'm giving. This lady right here is still taking drugs and she could be pregnant again next month.

When you first hear about this, what goes through your mind? I think I was really horrified and terrified. That's Lynn Paltrow. I'm executive director and founder of National Advocates for Pregnant Women.

Lynn has become one of Barbara's fiercest critics, and full disclosure, she's Robert's sister's partner. Well, her explanation is that these women are having, in her terms, litters of damaged babies, and society forever will be responsible for them. She said litters? In this magazine article, Barbara even said, quote, we don't allow dogs to breed. We spay them. We neuter them.

I'm not saying that these women are dogs, but they're not acting any more responsible than a dog in heat. Are there people whose drug use is so out of control they can't parent? Yes. But creating an assumption that there is a class of people who don't deserve to procreate

who aren't worthy of procreating the human race, leads you down a path that we should have great concern about. That path is basically called... Eugenics? Well, I mean, Hitler thought that if you were Jewish, that you had given up the right to be mother and he sterilized people as well. Well, I just want to eliminate drug-addicted babies from being born. I mean, I don't think that puts me in the same category as Hitler. What's the worst thing you've been called by one of your critics? Probably racist.

I mean, I'm married to a black man, so that was just funny to me. And according to Barbara, the majority of the women she pays are white. Do you think, like... But I asked Barbara about some of the things that she said because, to be totally honest, they kind of turned my stomach. I like you. I get the sense that there's a lot of warmth in you. You're obviously a great mom. But that feels cold to me.

I was just pissed at what they had done to my children. All the babies I had seen and all the people that have called me to tell me about their babies that were damaged. I had everybody's abuse on my back, and I didn't care how we said it or how we did it, just don't have any more children. Because at that point, I didn't really know any of them. So I didn't see them as people. I just saw them as child abusers. This might be a mixture. But she says she doesn't feel that way anymore. After I've gotten to know so many of the women...

Barbara has this drawer in her desk. Ms. Harrison's staffer. Filled with dozens of letters from women that she's paid. I want to thank you for your support and kindness as always. She said, thank you so much for the gift. I bought my son an excavator truck, remote control, and some summer outfits. This is from 2000. To whom it may concern, I have been doing very good. I just got custody of my 8-year-old son, and I'm so proud, and I have 4 years clean. Anyways, God bless you. Sincerely,

Jennifer. Have you ever had someone call or write you and say that they regret their decision? No, I've only had somebody call and say they regret that they didn't stay on birth control. Which I find kind of hard to believe. But then again, I must have read at least 100 news articles as I was reporting this story, and I didn't find a single case of someone saying that they regretted what they'd done. How many women have you paid? We have paid...

4,266. That's a lot of people. That's a lot of people. Yeah. She actually emailed me afterwards and adjusted that number down a couple hundred. So in the end, I mean, where did you come down on this? I ended up finding myself really conflicted about it.

Like, I agree with Lynn that this program does perpetuate a stereotype. Tell me what your image of a drug-using pregnant woman is. Who are they? It would be wrong to assume the women Barbara talks about on TV. And these women don't just have one and two babies. They have six, seven, eight, ten, fourteen. All these women who have so many babies and never try to seek drug treatment.

It would be wrong to think that they represent all women who use drugs while they're pregnant. The women who I've worked with who've had a history of drug problems aren't like the examples that she gives. These are women who love their children, who sought help. And she says oftentimes the women who want help have a really hard time finding it. And Barbara's not offering that. She's not offering treatment. She's not offering counseling. And there are programs that do that. But...

I said this to Lind despite all the things that troubled me about Barbara's program. I feel like what she's trying to do is to stop a kid from getting born into a childhood that's gonna suck.

The fact that you're motivated by a really beautiful, important value that we want healthy kids doesn't mean the mechanism you're using is going to end up helping those kids. Because the truth is, you have no idea how these kids are going to turn out. Yeah. Like, nobody's arguing that women should do drugs when they're pregnant. That is a bad way to start a kid's life. But that's just the beginning of the kid's life. So much can happen after that. You...

And for me, this whole story really shifted. Where are you at, Destiny? When I started spending some time with Destiny, Barbara's 22-year-old daughter. You know, as you can see, I like to talk. Even though Destiny's mom was doing all sorts of drugs during her pregnancy and the doctors told Barbara that Destiny was going to be mentally and physically delayed, Not feeling the way I'm supposed to feel. she just isn't. Could you just tell us what you are doing now? You're finishing college, right? Yeah.

I'm almost done. I'm graduating in December. That's exciting. And right now I'm student teaching. So that's fun. But the moment I really felt like, whoa, was when we started talking about the little baby that we keep hearing in the background of everything. That's my little girl. She's 20 months old. She'll be two in January. And so her name's Kalia and she's a complete nut. I don't know where she gets that from. Oh yeah, she keeps me busy.

Were you planning to have Clea? Nope. She was a noobs kid. She was totally a noobs kid. We'll just be honest. We just didn't think, I just didn't think, you know, you know, they say it only takes one time. Well, yep. That is so true. One time. And nine months later. So yeah, it's embarrassing, but I believe everything happens for a reason. And I think that, no, I didn't plan on it.

But I wouldn't take her back for anything because she made me better. I want her to be able to look back on her life one day, maybe when she's getting interviewed. I don't know. And be able to say that, yes, my mom was there for me 100% without a doubt. And I mean, I have straight A's and I'm making it work and I'm going to graduate with honors. And one day I'm going to be able to tell her, look, I did this. You can do this. Like,

push yourself, and you got it. That's really impressive. I mean, you're just, you're saying a lot of things that are really impressive. To her, like, I matter. Like, I make a difference to her. All right, we can stop. So we did stop. And I packed up my stuff, was pretty much done. And Barbara and Destiny walked me out to my car. Kalia came too. I had a little basketball for her. Oh my goodness!

Oh my goodness. And at a certain point, I noticed over my shoulder, Barbara's crouched down and she's got her phone out and she's taking a picture of this just perfect little scene. Can you kick it? You're training her already. You're going to kick it? Yeah. And I just felt like I was in one of those moments that contains everything that's good about us as people. Kick it to him. Slow to you.

Watching this, I couldn't help but think that Destiny's very existence is probably the most interesting argument against what Barbara is doing. You missed it. You gotta kick it back. Because if Barbara had gotten to Destiny's birth mom, Destiny, Kalia, this moment, none of it would exist. Yeah. And I told Destiny I was thinking about this and asked her about it. Um, my situation turned out positive. Like, absolutely.

I mean, as far as positives can go, I think I hit the jackpot. A lot of times that's not the case.

And you just kind of have to weigh it. Like, is it worth it? Like, I could have turned out like some of the other kids. Destiny says before she was born, her mom had four other girls. These were kids that didn't end up with Barbara? Yeah, three of them ended up in other foster homes and seemed to have done pretty well. But one of them. Okay, well, one of them, don't really know what happened to her.

She's somewhere, but it's not good from what we've heard. Last they heard, she was living on the streets in LA. And that could have very easily been one of us. I mean, yes, I might get a great family, but I might not. And the question that was stuck in my head right then was like, if you could choose between being born knowing that your life might end up like that and not like it is now, or not been born at all, what would you have done? Not been born at all.

I wouldn't want to put it up to chance because what kind of life is that? You mean that? I do mean that. Yeah. All jokes aside, I know I've been joking a lot in this interview, but I mean it with all that I am. Oh, she wants to see it. Back together. Taylor Swift's never getting back together. He's saying never ever.

Oh, oh. No, baby, be careful. Just sing. Okay. You want to say bye? Bye. Say bye? Say bye. Okay. Aw, you blew him a kiss. That was nice. Okay. That was nice. Remind me of this. Destiny has, what, three...

Brothers and sisters that also were raised with her? Yeah, two brothers and one sister. What happened to them? Isaiah's in college, and Taylor and Brandon, I met them at Barbara's house, and they seemed to be fine. And what about the four kids that weren't raised with Barbara? Do you know anything about the other four?

Just a little. There were four girls, and Barbara and Destiny told me that a few years ago they found three of them, and they all either were in college or had finished college. So then the one that's in trouble is just one of eight. Yeah, one of eight. So I guess you could say to yourself seven out of eight of these kids did it right. That's interesting. I mean, that's a different kind of odds, but it's... Yeah. Producer Pat Walters. ♪

Radiolab was created by Chad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Susie Lechtenberg is our executive producer. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachel Cusick, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhun Yana Sambindam, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson,

Sarah Khary, Ana Raskwet-Pas, Ariane Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster, with help from Carolyn McCusker and Sarah Sonbach. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Adam Schibill. Hi.

This is Brian from Alameda, California. Leadership support for Radiolab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Thanks, guys.

On Notes from America, we have conversations with people across the country about how we can truly become the nation that we claim to be. Each week, we talk about race, our politics, education, relationships, usually all of them, because everything's connected. And you, our listeners, are at the center of those conversations. I'm Kai Wright. Join me on Notes from America, wherever you get your podcasts.