Stranger in the nest

I’m borrowing the title of a 1999 book by the late University of Texas psychologist David Cohen for the title of this post, but it’s really about research to be released Thursday by the AAAS’s Science magazine. One is not supposed to bust their news embargoes but, let me tell you, the NYTimes and other newspapers do it constantly, and may do so on this interesting genetic finding. If so I’ll update this with a link. Seems medical researchers at Harvard have discovered that, while most of our genes have chromosomes contributed by our mothers and fathers, nature can turn off the contributed genes in some cells in an event called "random monoallelic expression." Which would explain why some of us might not get the diseases–even genetic ones–that our parents suffered. It might also help explain why some children are so different from their parents. Cohen used previous genetics findings–and his own parental experiences–to assert that, whatever they may think about it, parents actually have little ability to affect how their kids turn out. He might have been more accurate than he knew.