Are stress and trauma passed down the generations?

Does trauma pass down through the generations? Can someone who has been through a war, a genocide, or a famine in some manner pass that experience on to their children? Grandchildren, even? If so, how? Are the effects purely physiological-or could they even be psychological? It’s a fascinating question for our current dark times. And fortunately we have a carefully written article by Rodrigo Santodomingo of El País which thoughtfully assesses the current state of play [1] (English speaking readers-you are going to need your translator app for this one)

What impressed us was intellectual rigour of experts whom Rodrigo consulted, like Professor Isabelle Mansuy of the University of Zurich and Dr Anna García Gómez, a professional psychiatrist. Professor Mansuy is particularly sharp “it’s not the trauma that’s transmitted, it’s the effects.” she notes. Clear distinctions like this allow us all to wade through a morass of strong evidence, weak evidence, hopeful claims and provisional findings. That something is happening, and that it’s epigenetic seems reasonably certain. Studies of rats indicate that parents subjected to trauma or prolonged stress do indeed have observable consequences in subsequent generations. But-can these changes be genetic as well as epigenetic? The pioneering work of Dr Rachel Yehuda and on the survivors of concentration camps and their descendants is considered: but she always stresses that any alterations associated with the FKBP5 gene are in expression, not its structure. As Professor Mansuy concludes: “we know almost nothing about the epigenetic transmission of trauma. This doesn’t mean its not there, but it’s extremely difficult to prove” (LSS translation)

Why are we raising all this? We can never forget our excitement upon learning that life experiences can be transmitted down the generations even if only by epigenetic mechanisms (If you want to know more about this The Epigenetics Revolution by Professor Nessa Carey is a great place to start) [2] But at a deeper level, and as one presiding over a Whiggish sort of blog we want to live in a safer, more prosperous world where people are on the whole better educated and better off than their parents had been. If trauma from old wars and other catastrophes poisons minds and prevents future generations from achieving this then it’s a form of pollution just as evil as say plastics, pesticides or radiation. The Bible waxes lyrical in several places about the iniquity of sinners being inflicted on future generations. What a pity if the sinned-against must suffer the same fate!

[1] La alargada sombra del trauma: ¿Se transmiten sus efectos de padres a hijos? | Ciencia | EL PAÍS

[2] The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease and Inheritance: Amazon.co.uk: Carey, Nessa: 9781848313477: Books

#genetics #epigenetics #stress #trauma #psychology #biology

Nobel Prize for Economics shows this blog was right all along

Back in the dark days of January 2021, when the world economy was reeling from the savage hit of the COVID-19 pandemic, we published a short blog called How to Get some Free Money(LSS 2 1 21) Everyone at that time was worried about the colossal debts their governments had run up to pay for the catastrophe-were we all to be bankrupt for ever? Our point was that Science and Technology were the key to economic success. Encourage them. and you will grow your way out of debt. However hard a medieval peasant worked and saved he could never hope to achieve the productive levels of a man with a steam driven plough.

How comforting then, to find that better, more profound minds have demonstrated this truth at a Nobel level. By incredibly detailed studies Joel Mokyr, Phillipe Aghion and Peter Howitt [1] have looked at archives, crunched the numbers, weaved out feedback loops and carried out any number of other careful ratiocinations to prove the point. You can read more here [2] if you like graphs and words and things. But for us three things stand out.

There has to be abstract learning first. Many of the ideas and processes that drove the industrial revolution had appeared a hundred years before as the abstruse discoveries of thinkers like Newton and Hooke, which the average man in the street would have called “bonkers!”. There has to be a social ecology of skilled and trained workers, able to quickly deploy and develop the new ideas. In the eighteenth century this meant craftsmen like watchmakers and weavers. Now it means experts in AI and biotechnology. Finally a society must be open to rapid change: and welcome it where possible. For if you do not, someone will rapidly steal your markets with a new idea you could have developed but didn’t, because the old ways were tied and tested(think Kodak and digital cameras) [3]

All of which has relevance now, especially in the United States of America and the UK. In both those countries there is a growing movement to throw over renewable energy technologies and move back to coal and oil as soon as possible. We understand the fears and share some of the nostalgia for a bygone age which the proponents of this U turn so plainly demonstrate, Yet we also recognise that other countries will not. They will adapt clean green technologies rather fast. Not only will this leave the Anglo-Saxon economies hopelessly far behind. Their pollution will also make them a dangerous threat to other places in the world. Places which may seek to shut down that danger by whatever means necessary.

[1]https://www.nobelprize.org/all-nobel-prizes-2025/

[2]https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2025/10/advanced-economicsciencesprize2025.pdf

[3]https://www.forbes.com/sites/chunkamui/2012/01/18/how-kodak-failed/

#science #technology #growth #innovation #digital cameras #renewable energy

Hello we’re back-and we have Nobel Prizes!

First of all, apologies for our forced and utterly unwanted absence. But Domestic Renovations, and the sorts of people who carry them out, can be as tiresome and time-consuming as any other human relationship which the Gentleman Scholar must negotiate -domestic staff mistresses and lovers, cleaners, mechanics, and countless others. All require patient listening, multiple cups of tea and hefty pay offs, if only to still their incessant demands for even a moment. But here we are back again where it counts-with you, gentle readers. And we are glad to say that we return with one of our favourite sequences of the year. It’s Nobel Prize season again. [1]

For us, the Nobel prizes are the very essence of what this blog is all about. That careful learning and scholarship are not only what lifts our lives above the miserable condition of wild apes (well, some of us): they constitute the only only possible escape route from our current plights, many of which are serious and grave. And this time we think we can prove it. with the help of three of the very winners themselves-how’s that for endorsement, ladies and gentlemen? That’s the prize which will receive our first detailed attention, in the next blog: but let’s start with a roll call of the stupendously intelligent people who have stood out this year as the cream of humanity

Physics: John Clarke Michel H Devoret John M Martins Amazing work “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit” Yup, we kind of lost too it after the fourth word in the citation, but we’ll try to understand it better in time for a later blog

Chemistry Susuma Kitagawa Richard Robson Omar M Yaghi Want to capture Carbon dioxide, water in the desert, store toxic gases and many other things? These discoveries will let you do all of them. If this isn’t right on the raison d’etre of this blog, we don’t know what is. Again, come back later for more

Physiology and/or Medicine Anything in these fields must be close to an LSS reader’s heart. So the work of Mary E Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi on the tricky world of the immune system requires our most emphatic hats-off

Literature and Peace Intelligence can be of the Emotional kind as well as the academic, as many of us discover with agonising slowness and pain. So although these subjects lie outside the remit of our blog we are proud to give honourable mentions to László Krasznahorkai and Maria Corina Machado respectively (is she a relative of Antonio Machado the famous Spanish poet, we wonder?-ed)

But finally our first next blog on this subject, as t’were, will be devoted to the patient Economics work of Joel Mokyr, Phillipe Aghion and Peter Howitt. Because finally they have shown at Nobel level, what we have believed for so long. It’s science and learning that drives the economy. Which is where we go next time.

[1] https://www.nobelprize.org/all-nobel-prizes-2025/

#nobel prizes #economics #physics #chemistry #medicine #physiology #economics

How climate change drives the return of deadly diseases

We never thought we’d see it. But Malaria is making a comeback in the British Isles [1] According to the latest findings from the UK Health Security Agency(UKHSA) cases rose by a whopping 32% from 2022 to 2023 making them the highest in 20 years. More than 2000 cases in fact. Now some of this is due no doubt to travel bounce backs after the COVID 19 pandemic. But once put into a broader context. the real pattern becomes both clear and alarming. Global warming is driving a massive spread of insect vector diseases. Dangerous diseases that almost seemed under control until the oil companies unleashed climate change on an innocent world

Staying with Britain just for now, William Hunter of the Mail [2] reports on the appearance of two deadly mosquitoes in the UK: the Egyptian mosquito Aedes aegypti and the appropriately named Tiger mosquito Aedes albopictus. For now these are isolated events, and under current conditions their spread may even be containable. But every year the climate gets a little warmer. Every year brings a higher chance that these vectors will spread their deadly triple load: Dengue Fever, Chikungunya and Zika. With all the consequences which wel- seasoned readers of this blog will recall from our earlier outings on this theme (see LSS 25 3 25, 25 10 21 and many others)

We confess to becoming a little angry when we we write stories like this: such disasters could have been so avoidable. Once, not so long ago these diseases were unknown in this islands except as travellers’ tales, or as the province of medical specialists. Now a wave is crossing the world. We know what the remedy is. If by any chance you are a parent reading these lines: this story is one more line of evidence among many. Your children can never be truly safe until global warming is finally controlled and reversed.

[1]https://ukhsa.blog.gov.uk/2025/05/21/how-we-protect-the-uk-from-vector-borne-diseases/

[2]https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-15151429/tropical-diseases-britain-mosquitoes-dengue-fever.html

[3]https://wellcome.org/news/how-climate-change-affects-vector-borne-diseases

#disease #malaria #dengue fever #climate change #g;obal warming #health

Heroes of Learning: Leonardo Pisano(Fibonacci)

Have you ever looked at the strange spiral in a broccoli floret and wondered how it got like that? Or hundreds of other things in nature from the shapes of waves on the beach to the arrangements of artichoke leaves? The answer to all this and much more was discovered by Leonardo Pisano, better known to the modern world as Fibonnaci.(C1170 AD-c 1245) [1] [2]

A bright lad from Pisa in Italy, his big break came when his father took him on a business trip to Bugia in what is now called Tunisia. Father and son met an Arab mathematician (the Islamic world was still far ahead in science and technology) who kindly showed them the amazing new numbering system which they had learned in turn from the Hindus. The young Leo realised at once that this strange numerical system of 0, 1 2-9 was utterly superior to the cumbersome Roman system of letters( V X MCXCCVL, etc) On his return to Italy he published the Liber Abaci, whose short 27 or so chapters are one of the most significant books in the canon of western learning. Not only did it update all and sundry on the new number system. Not only was it full of useful applications for this system. Above all it promulgated an intriguing new sequence of numbers which goes 0,1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13…..to infinity. Each number in the sequence is formed by adding the two before. Dividing one by its predecessor quickly gets to the Golden ratio, which artists and architects have been using as on of the most aesthetically pleasing constructions for centuries.

We have alluded here before to odd mathematical structures such as pi and Eulers number: which show up again and again in nature: Fibonacci’s sequence is another of them. We have no idea why, but then: nor does anyone else. But the real significance of Fibonacci was his timing. For the first time, and after a long sleep, Western Europe was starting to make original contributions in natural sciences. And it did it by borrowing humbly from other more learned cultures. A lesson we should not forget today.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci

[2]https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zm3rdnb

#fibonacci #mathematics #middle ages ##tunisia #india #biology #architecture

Human Evolution: More muddle in the middle?

Taking time out as ever from more serious matters, we return to our old playground of human evolution. And not just for R and R, important as that is. Also, because the methods and pronouncements of its scholars are important guides to how we should all approach any complicated and potentially controversial subject.

Until recently the origin of our own species seemed fairly clear cut. It emerged from a pack of other big-brained contenders (think Denisovans and Neanderthals among others) starting around 250 000 years ago, in Africa, and clearing the rest of the field no later than 35000 years BP. However recent work by Professor Chris Stringer of London’s prestigious Natural History Museum and colleagues have now cast this into doubt. It is even possible that the line leading to Homo sapiens may have started to go its own way before 1000 000 years BP. You can read why in these takes from Jonathan Chadwick of the Mail here [1] or a slightly extended version in the museums own PR piece here [2] It all goes back to 1990 and the discovery of a rather squashed skull called Yunxian 2 which was attributed to Homo erectus: a perfectly reasonable decision at the time. But using advanced new reconstruction techniques Stringer and his colleagues assert

……… Yunxian 2 displays a unique combination of primitive and more advanced traits. These include a large, squat braincase and a more projecting lower face, similar to Homo erectus. At the same time, derived features in the face and rear of the braincase, as well as a larger brain capacity, are closer to later species such as Homo longi (‘Dragon Man’) and Homo sapiens.

We have been following this game for for nearly six decades: so what do we think? First Chris Stringer is a fine scholar whom we have always admired. Secondly, we welcome all attempts to re evaluate data and set it in new contexts: that way real learning occurs. Our caveat is more with practice . Always and again in human evolution, new fossils found are baptised with confident new binomial Latin names in the great Linnean tradition. Then vast conclusions are drawn, which, in our experience, are substantially revised some years later. This has led not only to the muddle in the middle to which the articles allude. There are plenty more early on the story, and more than one much later on. We think the first clearing step should be to talk less about species, and more about gene frequencies populations. and ways of life. These clearly cluster at points of excavation, such as Afar, Java or Atapuerca to name but a few. But each point, however iconic, is represented by relatively few bones. There are enormous gaps in space and time between each, into which genes and populations must have been flowing all the time. Is it not possible that there has only been one human line all along, and that many of the variations are likely due to factors such as ecology, climate or isolation? The real answer is to dig, dig and dig again.

[1]https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-15132633/skull-pushes-origins-400-000-years.html

[2]https://www.nhm.ac.uk/press-office/press-releases/analysis-of-reconstructed-ancient-skull-pushes-back-our-origins-.html

#paleoanthropology #human evolution #clade #species #Homo sapiens #China

Stock markets: a crash waiting to happen?

Photo by John Guccione http://www.advergroup.com on Pexels.com

Predictions of imminent and terrible stock market crashes are as cheap and common as chewing gum. That’s why we wouldn’t take them seriously at all if they didn’t really happen sometimes. With dreadful consequences, like the ones of 1929 and 2007-2008 for example. And so when an expert as prescient as Larry Elliott of the Guardian offers a warning, we have to sit up and take notice. [1]

Elliott builds his case carefully, first noting that the chances of the next crash increase the further we move away from the last one. He points to slowing US job creation, rising unemployment and inflation as signs of underlying problems, while the stock market continues soaring away to record levels. We at LSS might have taken even that in our stride were there not so many worrying parallels with the situation in 1929 just before the Wall Street Crash. That summer the economy was starting to show signs of downswing too, while the markets reached giddy new heights Then, as now wealth was concentrated in relatively few hands, making the rich responsible for a disproportionate amount of consumer spending. As Elliott points out

30% of the wealth of Americans[is] accounted for by shares. Since share ownership is concentrated among the better-off, the US economy is relying on the Wall Street boom continuing, and for the rich to carry on spending their gains.

If they stop, the downturn will be very sharp indeed; as it was in 1929.

And this is where our take on Elliott’s article becomes slightly disquieting. He rightly notes that American policy is sharply divided over what to do. Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve want to leave interest rates where they are, to bear down upon inflation. As President Trump rightly adduces, this could bring down the Stock Market at any time. However, although the President’s idea of cutting interest rates might preserve the equity boom a little longer, it risks dangerous problems with Bond markets as inflation takes hold. For US Treasuries are not just bits of paper. They are still the prime benchmarks for setting lending and borrowing rates around the world. If foreigners lose confidence in US Treasuries, their own bond and equity markets will fall too, In turn dragging Wall Street into the crash the President so badly fears. Damned if you do; damned if you don’t. We do not envy him his choices.

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/25/us-stock-market-trump-wall-street-financial-crisis-federal-reserve

#economics #finance #shares #bonds #wall street crash #markets #depression

Two good news blogs: #2 The next pandemic is on BBC2

One thing we are quite proud of at this blog is that we have tried to warn you, gentle readers, of the several dreadful dangers that will confront you if you are not careful. Well aware of your tendency to find creative new ways to hate the neighbours wherever possible, we have, like faithful retainers, quietly sought to adduce the presence of other mortal perils. (LSS passim) Including massive volcanic eruptions, crashing asteroids, polar magnetic flips, toxic pollutants and climate change, which may also be lurking in wait. Nowhere have we been more assiduous than in adverting the threat of new pandemics to follow the COVID -19 epidemic. We have examined possible candidates such as antibiotic resistant bacteria, various viruses, and even fungi. We even speculated, following the work of the great Professor Harper, if such pandemics could lead our own society to share the dreadful fate of the once proud Roman civilisation which preceded us [1]

How gratifying then, when a man of learning and ability far greater than our own covers so much of the same ground, as Dr Chris van Tulleken does for BBC2 [2] In Disease X: Hunting the Next Pandemic. This polymathic Professor of Infectious Diseases at UCL makes a veritable tour de force of the worlds hotspots of deadly virus potential. Taking in such tragic examples as the Nipah virus which still represents a mortal peril in regions of Southern Asia [3] and of course considers the avian flu H5N1, a real old favourite of this blog. Its full of heartbreaking scenes, scarily secure suits and laboratories, and some really intelligent doctors and scientists talking knowledgeably, using reason instead of wild emotional overreaction.

And it may surprise you to learn that Dr van Tulleken ends the show on a cautious note of hope. We doubt that he is a regular reader of our blog. But he touts one of the same themes we have been pushing in the last year or so: using AI to design and synthesise new molecules-antibiotics, vaccines, what have you-to stay ahead of the genetic permutations and combinations thrown up in the organisms that are trying to make a meal of us . If there is hope, it lies in science and reasoned investigation. As certain Presidents of the United States of America should take note.

{1] Kyle Harper The Fate of Rome Princeton University Press 2018

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002jy6q/disease-x-hunting-the-next-pandemic

[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998%E2%80%931999_Malaysia_Nipah_virus_outbreak

[4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus_subtype_H5N1

#avian flu #pandemic #health #medicine #virus

Two good news blogs:#1 AI designer phages against antibiotic resistance

Its not often we bring you unabashed good news, gentle readers. Nor moreover, blow our own trumpet. But the following from Nature Briefing AI Helps design E. coli killing viruses not only unites so many of the themes we push here-(AI molecular design, multidisciplinary studies, bacteriophages etc etc)-that we think that the advance it represents it makes this one of our more significant blogs in months.

Using artificial intelligence (AI), researchers have designed novel viruses capable of killing strains of Escherichia coli. The team used the DNA of a simple bacteriophage called ΦX174 to guide AI models to generate viral genomes with the specific function of infecting antibiotic-resistant strains of E. coli. Researchers used the model’s suggested sequences to select 302 viable phages. When put to the test, 16 of these phages could infect E. coli, and combinations of them could kill three strains of the bacterium, a feat the original ΦX174 couldn’t pull off.Nature | 5 min read
Reference: bioRxiv preprint (not peer reviewed)

its certainly worth clicking on the Nature article and even the Preprint, which has a surprisingly well written summary

Old hands to this blog will recall our long standing worries about this organism. Normally Escherichia coli (named after the ingenious Dr Theodor Escherich) is a fine upstanding member of the microbiological community, being common in nature and a doyenne of experimental departments in microbiological schools. But certain strains of it are developing a profound resistance to our best antibiotics including piperacillin/tazobactam combinations. Which could have made it a very False Friend indeed. But now it seems that Dr King and his team have got ahead of the game.

Note the careful language, full admissions that peer review awaits, and generally understated claims that mark the true signs of trustworthy scholarship. How different from some situations where leaders of great nations go before the cameras and make huge unsubstantiated claims about phenomena of which they have no certain knowledge, But when you choose to believe only what you want to believe, fate has a nasty way of catching up eventually. Wait for the next blog and we’ll tell you more .

#E.coli #bacteriophages #AI #designer biochemistry #antibiotic resistance #microbiology #medicine #health

Why Net Zero threatens a wonderful land-that was

Kingston on Thames, Surrey, England. Spring 1962. A brand new Ford Zodiac pushes out from a brand-new house on a brand-new estate to begin a Sunday outing down to the south coast. Mum, Dad and their two kids on the back seat pass rows of new houses, all like theirs, all lived in by people like them. With cars like theirs at the fronts. This is Macmillan’s England, and people have never had it so good. Even, for the first time, the working classes. As the last new estates around Chessington drop behind and the real country begins at Box Hill, someone puts on the car radio. Listen! It’s the Shadows Wonderful Land,: and here, today, its dreamy tones are true. For as they head south on the A24 (soon to be massively widened) the temples of all this wonderful modernity are still visible in the brave new petrol stations and car showrooms sprouting across the sleepy countryside. The car has made people profoundly mobile and independent. People talk about them endlessly. Buy them, sell them Discuss performance. Your car is a badge of who you are, where you have arrived at, especially if you are a man. As our travellers pull into Worthing for a welcome ice cream they have indeed crossed a wonderful land.

This is the brave new world still remembered as the base line by the two children in the back of the Zodiac. Fast forward 2025 and they are well into their seventh decade. But they still remember the promise of those years with aching nostalgia. Their own lives, minus the usual vicissitudes of marital, family and work problems, have been tolerable enough: prosperous even, as their waistlines testify. But outside the narrow world of work and golf club, there have been disturbing changes. First crack in the wall came with the 1973 oil crisis, which demonstrated their country’s humiliating dependence on foreign oil. Tax cuts and North Sea Oil brought a brief sugar rush of prosperity: but now the world is a dark distrustful place hopelessly split between rich and poor where nothing ever works and everything is broken, from roads to trains to hospitals. Foreigners just keep coming and coming and coming. Above all the USA, their great patron and guarantor of all their security, is rapidly losing its ability to prosper and protect.

Now add something worse. All those grandchildren they sent off to University have come home to tell them that everything they believed in was wrong. That burning oil warms the planet to disastrous levels. [1] That vehicle emissions are a massive cause of mental and physical health disorders.[2] So are the plastics made from oils in abundance , which now pollute every imaginable stretch of sea air and land.[3] That, therefore, the whole cult of buying cars, comparing them, fiddling with them and collecting them turns out to have been as deluded as say smoking tobacco ,drinking alcohol or keeping slaves. That in effect, their whole lives have been a bit of a mistake That they now, with so little time left to enjoy , must give it all up.

It’s a big ask. Especially when incredibly rich industries run incredibly well funded political and media campaigns to tell these same baby boomers that they not only can go on burning fossil fuels, they really ought to- must. Because only that way lies the road to a better yesterday when the world was young. And straight. And white. Here is the challenge facing all of us who call ourselves progressive or educated . We have no idea if we shall succeed We know we will need swimming lessons if we do not,

[1] Burning of fossil fuels – Understanding Global Change

[2] Air pollution and health risks due to vehicle traffic – PMC

[3] 5 Harmful Effects of Plastic on Human Health

(See also LSS 9 4 24;26 9 24; 20 9 25)

https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?&q=the+shadows+wonderful+land&&mid=E99EB6B5B2B6CEBD22FBE99EB6B5B2B6CEBD22FB&&FORM=VRDGAR