FROM THE EDITORS May 3, 2010 Issue

GENETICS AND 'THE SCIENCE OF REAL BEING'

New genetic research is debunking key assumptions about evolution and the role that genes play in determining one's well-being.

Epigenetics—which studies changes in heredity resulting from the activation and deactivation of genes—is a growing science that's making some big claims. Among them, that genes can be altered in the short term, with meaningful effects on today's generation and their children; that doctors may be able to biochemically alter a patient's predisposition to diseases considered hereditary, such as cancer and Alzheimer's; and, perhaps most strikingly of all, that evolution—long thought only to occur over many, many years and generations—can happen in a relative blink of an eye, even within a generation or two.

Last month author David Shenk published his new book The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You've Been Told About Genetics, Talent and IQ Is Wrong. Epigenetics, he concludes, is "perhaps the most important discovery in the science of heredity since the gene."

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