Mom’s Experience Can Affect Your Genes  We all know that what a
mother eats, drinks, smokes and does during pregnancy can affect
her child’s prenatal development. But can it actually affect the
baby’s DNA?  Animal studies have shown that transient
environmental exposures of a pregnant female can produce
“epigenetic” changes in her offspring — chemical modifications
superimposed on the DNA sequence that affect how and when genes
are expressed.  It would of course be highly unethical to
purposefully subject human mothers to environmental insults for
the purpose of studying DNA effects in developing fetuses. But
history has provided researchers a unique opportunity to study
how one environmental factor, maternal nutrition, can affect an
unborn child at the genetic level.  In the winter of 1944-1945,
the Germans imposed a food embargo in the western part of the
Netherlands, leading to a period of famine known as the Dutch
Hunger Winter. Food was so scarce that the average daily caloric
intake was cut to about 667