Ghost in Your Genes

We watched GHOST IN YOUR GENES for our "fun" video day this last week--a break from class lectures. It had all of us very fascinated! I had heard about the genome mapping project years ago and hadn't kept up with the results. I knew that they were expecting this "map of the DNA" to be a major event that would have world shaking results. It was so amazing to find out that what they found was more questions! And now they are researching and studying what they call epigenomes.

The fun part of that for my kids was that we had just read, in Joy Hakim's book THE STORY OF SCIENCE: Newton at the Center, that there was a time that they thought the area of physics had all been "done". At the end of the nineteenth century "the head of the physics department at Harvard University advised his brightest students not to enter the field. There wasn't much left to do there, he said." Of course, just after this an amazing discovery took place and the twentieth century became the "age of physics". You never can say something is truely "done".

GHOST IN YOUR GENES brings up ideas that make you wonder what is going on in your body. Scientists are wondering now what we are passing on to future generations. Could it be, they speculate, that what we do to our body now will affect generations to come? Could taking care of our body be actually taken care of our future great grandchildren? This video really made us sit up and think. I love it when we stumble upon something that makes us so excited to find out more.