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Inherited epigenetic abnormalities
26/02/2008
the workplace compensation claims of the future?
The science of epigenetics was defined by its founder Conrad Waddington as the "the interactions of genes with their environment that bring the phenotype into being". In this case a phenotype is simply a physical and biochemical expression of these genetic and environmental factors interacting to produce one thing: a living organism with all its traits, charateristics and dispositions.
The fact that all human beings are comprised of these phenotypical traits, charateristics and dispositions should be enough to interest us in the subject of epigenetics. Yet it is only recently, since scientists have been able to unlock the genetic code and begun to gain a richer understanding of the ways our genes interact with the environment, that epigenetics, first postulated in the 1940s, has gained relevance.
In fact, it was not until the 1990s that the science of epigenetics received widespread interest and funding within the scientific community. Up until that point it had mostly been overshadowed by obsessions with understanding DNA and the influence of genotypes (those traits and characteristics which are entirely dictated by genetic factors).
Renewed interest in epigenetics has done much to help us better understand how human beings respond to their environments. The example of identical twins is a useful and elucidating one. It is commonly observed that identical twins who are separated at birth and brought up to respond to different environmental stimuli exhibit differing traits not simply attributable to dissimilar social and familial experiences.
Instead, it is a process of epigenetic changes influenced by the environment that produce different outcomes. Most genes exhibit a binary function, either being switched off or switched on by environmentally governed biochemical phenomena. So, to make a crude example, if identical twins who were separated at birth meet when they are 30 to find that one is obese and the other thin, one has lung cancer and the other not, these things might be understandable in the terms of epigenetic changes occuring as a result of one being a smoker and the other a binge eater.
Epigenetics becomes particuarly interesting when looked at in terms of inheritance. It has frequently been observed that certain epigenetic changes are inheritable. While this notion is increasingly gaining acceptance, for a long time it represented a kind of heresy to the geneticists and their idea of the human embryo as an untarnishable template for new life. Instead, epigeneticists argue that both the maternal and paternal genes which together form an embryo contain a kind of "memory" of their environment and experience, switching certain genes to on or off in the expectant embryo, with the switch position depending on parental environmental circumstance.
It is a reasonable speculation that the concepts and terminology of epigenetics may soon find themselves being negotiated in our court system. Already organisations like the Collegium Ramazzani have begun to investigate the epigenetic hazards posed by occupational environments. The hazards presented by biological waste, nanoparticles and endocrine disrupters may well all be one day at the fore of new workplace safety drives.
Failure to address how epigenetic changes effected by today's hazardous substances might produce harmful abnormalites to future generations could have tragic consequences. Employers surely have a duty to participate in the research, if they don't it may just be that while others pay the human cost, they will have to pay the financial cost of the workplace compensation claims of the future. Let's just hope that is not something that the personal injury solicitors of 2050 do not have to contend with.
