"Do we inherit our parents' psychological trauma?"

New research from Rachel Yehuda, a professor of psychiatry in the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, has been hailed as proof that psychological burdens of parents might affect their children not only as part of their upbringing, but that a form of molecular imprint might also be transferred. The main finding in her paper is that in her study of Holocaust survivors and their offspring, there are distinct chemical tags on a gene involved in stress responses. That research is called epigenetics - it's not the study of the genes themselves or the code in them, but of chemical "bookmarks" attached to them.

- Rachel Yehuda, PhD, Professor, Psychiatry, Neuroscience, Director, Traumatic Stress Studies Division, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

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