We d. W. Stamford at 88.5 w. Our allies Southampton at 91.3 and w. When p.r. . Rachel Yahoo is and neuroscientist and an epic geneticist a pioneer in understanding how experiences can imprint us at a cellular level her work demonstrates that trauma can transmit biological vulnerability to stress in future generations but it also yields knowledge as a form of power to flourish through the traumas large and small that shape all of our lives and communities when you are able to put something in a context to carry it with you but you carry it with you in a way that promotes more reflection in a way that gives you more of a context in a way that shows you where you've come from in a way that honors your past but it doesn't own you you cannot run from your past but maybe you would run farther if you carried your past with you as long as you can control it I'm Krista Tippett and this is On Being Stay with us. Live from n.p.r. News in Washington Stevens Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore is facing mounting calls to leave the race because of sexual misconduct allegations a 5th woman is accusing more of making sexual advances toward her decades ago when she was a teenager and he was a prosecutor in his thirty's n.p.r. Susan Davis reports the top Republicans are exploring options for next month's special election Alabama Republican Senator Richard Shelby says he believes Roy Moore's accusers and that is candidacy is harming the Republican Party if this keeps up the beer reparable more than half a dozen senators including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are calling on more to abandon his campaign more denies any wrongdoing and is showing no indication he will drop out because as Republicans are exploring whether or not to try and field a write in candidate in an effort to deprive more of the votes he needs to win Sen Cory Gardner of Colorado who runs the 2800 Senate campaign operation has gone even further he says if more wins the Senate should vote to expel him Susan Davis n.p.r. News the Capitol Attorney General Jeff Sessions is directing federal prosecutors to consider the possibility of naming a 2nd special counsel to investigate alleged wrongdoing by democrats The move follows a request from House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte the Virginia Republican is seeking a probe of the Clinton Foundation and an Obama era deal to buy uranium from a company backed by the Russian government the Us Supreme Court will hear a challenge to a California law that requires so-called crisis pregnancy centers to tell patients about state funded contraception and abortion services as N.P.R.'s Nina Totenberg swellings the centers which tried to dissuade women from having abortion claim the law infringes on their right to free speech the case was brought by Christian based facilities that argued the law unconstitutional it compels them to post the information. But the state contends that these facilities use deceptive advertising that confuses and even intimidates women who are lured to the clinics believing they're going to receive neutral counseling to counter that the state says it requires the facilities to inform patients whether there are medical personnel on the staff and to disclose the availability of the free contraceptive and abortion services provided elsewhere a federal appeals court panel upheld the law as a permissible state regulation of the health care industry Nina Totenberg n.p.r. News Washington Iran's state run news agency says the search for earthquake survivors has ended the magnitude 7.3 quake struck mountain villages and towns along the border with Iraq overnight Sunday killing more than 400 people and injuring thousands more aid groups are trying to restore power and water in the region and get emergency shelter to the people who are displaced this is n.p.r. News. According to new medical guidelines many more Americans have high blood pressure than current statistics suggest in the past high blood blood pressure has met a top rating of at least 140 in a bottom of 90 under the new guidelines the number would drop to 130 over 80 Dr Paul Welton of Tulane University led the panel behind the change researchers studied the risk factor in more than 100 adolescents between 11 and 13 John Van Meter of Georgetown University says in boys it was associated with an increased desire for immediate gratification interestingly in the girls the effect was the opposite they were less likely to focus on short term rewards than meters says the finding has implications for programs aimed at preventing substance abuse in adolescence what might be best for boys may not be the right approach with girls he presented his findings at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Washington d.c. Jon Hamilton n.p.r. News Maurice's prime minister says his government will again distribute one off Christmas payments to lower earning Greeks drawing from a budgetary surplus that was built on severe spending cuts and high taxes Alexis Tsipras says 1400000000 euro will be given to at least 3400000 Greeks this holiday season that compares to 6170000 euros that was issued to pensioners last year. On Wall Street stocks closed higher with the Dow Jones Industrial Average gaining 17 points the Nasdaq composite index rose 6 points and the s. And p. 500 gained 2 Asian shares are mixed higher in Tokyo this is n.p.r. News in Washington. We have. Support for n.p.r. Comes from Home Advisor matching homeowners with local home improvement professionals for a variety of projects from repairs to remodels homeowners can read reviews of background checks pros book appointments at Home Advisor dot com and the Corporation for Public. We're just starting to understand that just because you're born with a certain set of genes you're not in a biologic prison as a result of the genes that changes can be made to how those genes function that can help the idea is a very simple idea and you hear it from people all the time people say when something cataclysmic happens to them I'm not the same person I've been changed I am not the same person that I was and epigenetics gives us the language and the science to be able to start unpacking. Genetics describes d.n.a. Sequencing but the new field of epigenetics sees that genes can be turned on and off and expressed differently to changes in environment and behavior and Rachel you heard it is a pioneer and understanding how the effects of stress and trauma can transmit biologically beyond cataclysmic events to the next generation she studied the children of holocaust survivors and the children of pregnant women who survived the 911 attacks but her science is a form of power for flourishing beyond the traumas large and small that mark each of our lives and those of our families and communities I'm Krista Tippett and this . Is a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience and the director of the Traumatic Stress studies division at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine she grew up in a neighborhood in Cleveland that was heavily populated with Holocaust survivors a fact she didn't register so much as a child but which later became pivotal to the discovery she has helped to make I spoke with her in 2015. The way I start all of my conversations where I'm talking to is is just wondering about how you would describe how you would start to describe the spirit religious or spiritual background of your childhood however you would describe that now I had a very strong spiritual background I was raised in an observant Jewish community I went to a Jewish day school. My father was a rabbi. So there was a lot of Jewish study and Jewish culture and Jewish religion in our home and also at school so I was surrounded by actually immersed in the bubble of observant Judaism. So you at b. Told me that you were the 1st graduating class where you were given the option of getting Was this your ph d. In my ph ph d. In psychology or neuroscience that this is a young field was really just coming into its own and so I just I wonder how you would start to tell the story of you know in your lifetime. The emergence of you know like the difference between what you thought you were going into when you I guess decided maybe you what was it that you want to study psychiatry and how you've watched that develop what's been fascinating to you to be part of that that what was fascinating from the very beginning my work in graduate school was focused on stress hormones and I was a great deal of interest in understanding the biologic response to stress and then is this is like around the time that stress was becoming this Mord that was in the culture Yeah I think stress as a word was in the culture or really in the forty's and fifty's also. But it wasn't until around that time that there was a biology associated with stress right and people were very interested in it and they were very interested in this idea that something that happens to you generates a biological response and people knew a lot about stress hormones from the adrenals. What started happening in the seventy's in the eighty's was a recognition that there were stress hormone receptors in the brain and what that meant was that the brain wasn't just barking orders out peripheral tissue like the adrenal gland there was a dialogue going on it wasn't just the brain regulating everything it was an ability of stress hormones to circle back and influence how the brain function and and even in the eighty's as a graduate student I was awed by that concept so that meant that things or lodging in our bodies and that that things were happening at a physiologically level and affecting all the things we saw it with the brain and that was new I think it was new because everything was new and yeah but it wasn't but it was certainly new to me and the. The work that I did in graduate school was really following up a series of findings that suggested that when you remove adrenal glands in infant rodent pups the brain begins to develop much more than usual and you get an adult rodent that has a brain that is 15 percent larger than if you hadn't removed the adrenal glands and that was really interesting because what it meant was that stress hormones play a really critical role in how the brain develops and how behavior develops. So my understanding is that you you wanted to look at this connection and people and I know I'm simplifying this but at some point you went back to your old neighborhood in Cleveland and you started studying the Holocaust survivors and I don't know if you're saying the children of holocaust survivors at that point and you found a similar cortisol profile in them that one would find in veterans who had p.t.s.d. . What happened was that I was having trouble understanding the relevance to humans Ok of that work and it was very important for me to be involved with something that was directly clinically relevant I asked to do some project in people and one thing led to another and I found myself at the Veterans Administration just a few years after the official diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder became known in the d.s.m. And. We were really among the 1st people that group to look at the biology of post-traumatic stress disorder and the observation that we made which was really very hard to understand at that time. As that the combat Vietnam veterans showed a lower court is all levels. Right and it was a surprising observation because cortisol levels as you may know are associated with stress responses and people that have depression and other kinds of mental illnesses and symptoms often show high cortisol levels so this idea that kind of veterans had low cortisol levels was really kind of almost a crisis in the field and and it was a crisis because the diagnosis of p.t.s.d. Itself was controversial Yeah and one day I said to my advisor Dr Earle Diller Yeah I said I don't know maybe you just got a packet up around this post-traumatic stress disorder and I grew up in a neighborhood of all costs arrivers and they're nothing like the patients here at the v.a. And he looked at me and he said that Rachel is a testable hypothesis. And then it went from there we decided to drive to Cleveland. A bunch of us and test the hypothesis that Holocaust survivors were similar to Vietnam veterans and essentially what we found is that there were a lot more similarities than we would have ever dreamed of and that they also had these low cortisol levels some of the same chemical markers were their biological mothers that that is what we observed her dad. In terms of the fact that Holocaust survivors notoriously were not treatment seeking in mental health. You know we asked Holocaust survivors about that and we asked them about the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder we asked about nightmares we asked about flashbacks we asked about those things they had been suffering many of them for decades with the symptoms and when. Yes Will did it ever occur to you to go and seek help. Many of them said who could understand what we had gone through and one woman said to me you know Dr you Hutto we don't have V.A.'s like your veterans do. I thought to myself whoa and went home and within 2 weeks we stabilized a holocaust clinic for Holocaust survivors at Mount Sinai. And the field that you again very near young even younger feel that you have not only stepped onto but helped are helping to shape is this this world of of epigenetics which is the idea that not only do experiences lodge physiologically but that physiological changes can actually be passed on to the next generation transmitted generationally transgenerational e. One helpful way to me that you've talked about epigenetics as you said think about genetics as the computer and epigenetics as the software the app of the program. Yes but so so again like you know in these old way some of these old ways where I'm learning we think about we would think about pylon tickle change between generations as being evolutionary as something that would take time but what you're learning is that that epigenetics it's a mechanism for short term adaptation that even genetic mutation can happen quickly and it's all around this trauma so that trauma itself gets inherited. Yeah it's not a genetic change per se but it's a change to the program and we're just starting to understand that just because you're born with a certain set of genes you're not in a biologic prison as a result of those genes that changes can be made to how those genes function that can help you know and maybe some changes that are more likely to work her than others and some genes are more flexible than other genes but the idea is a very simple idea and you hear it from people all the time people say when something cataclysmic happens to them I'm not the same person I've been changed I am not the same person that I was. And we have to start asking ourselves what do they mean by that cross or the same person they are. And. They do and what I think it means is that the environmental influence has been so overwhelming that it has forced a major constitutional change an enduring transformation and epigenetics gives us the language and the science to be able to start unpacking. Today with neuroscientist and. She's a pioneer in understanding how environmental and behavioral experiences can transmit effects at a cellular level and across generations. So it makes sense to us I think that parents who are charming ties in whatever way would exhibit things around their children right that would would affect the children but what you are showing is that it while that is true children who are in this sense to inherit trauma actually are born with less of a capacity to some of them born with less of a capacity to metabolize stress and is that an actual genetic change well let's unpack what you've said Ok if you set a lot of please leave. Me and I'm well I'm just going to clarify you know yeah whatever. There are 2 ways to influence the next generation not least. One way is to directly transmit something that you have and you transmitted in the form that you have it so let's say a change has been made on to your d.n.a. An epi genetic Mark now sits on a promoter region of your gene for example and through the magic of meiosis. That Mark gets transmitted through the act of reproduction the cell divides there's reproduction and it in the change sticks and it's present in the next generation that's one thing that's a transmitted change in time there's another kind of change that involves giving your child either at conception or in utero or post-conception a set of circumstances and the child is forced to make an adaptation to those circumstances right. And how would you talk about how that what the insides of this epigenetics adds into our understanding of those dynamics what can be an inherited passed on well let me go back to why we started looking at this in the 1st place we established a clinic for Holocaust survivors. And what we found was that our phone did ring but it was mostly children of holocaust survivors who called us. And what we began to see quite clearly was that offspring were reporting that they had been affected by the Holocaust in many different kinds of ways but it in a in a very coherent and cohesive pattern they talked about feeling traumatized by witnessing the symptoms of their parents and they talked about the expectations being traumatized by some of the expectations that the Holocaust had placed on them such as that they are the reason their parents survived and therefore there was a house that a face had take what now have to accomplish so that all the people that died or were they could give their lives meaning they had difficulty in any kind of a separation circumstance divorce those kinds of things and they described essentially this problem in separating from their parents I mean the time we started to treat Holocaust survivor offspring most of them were in their late thirty's or forty's or fifty's and their mindset was to describe themselves based on who their parents were and most people at that age are someone's parent or someone's bouse you know you're not very few people at that age are describing themselves in terms of who their parents were and I thought that in itself was very interesting when and what did you learn that was surprising and new oh a lot. Well 1st of all this idea that they felt. More vulnerable that could be supported by fact it turned out that holocaust offspring were 3 times more likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder if they were exposed to a traumatic event than demographically similar Jewish persons whose parents did not survive also in their lifetime they were more vulnerable to post traumatic stress in whatever experiences came their way. Right by now or whatever experiences came their way what was very very interesting was that there were some experiences that didn't register that much but all traumatic experiences that involved some kind of an interpersonal component was more likely to be difficult to holocaust offspring also showed a lot of resilience related qualities but in terms of this idea of being more vulnerable to depression or anxiety that was real we also found and this really was very surprising to us that holocaust offspring had the same neuro and a Korean or hormonal abnormalities that we were viewing in Holocaust survivors and persons with post-traumatic stress disorder and later on we refined that even more so that we realized that the specific risk for certain things like post-traumatic stress disorder was associated with having a mother that had post-traumatic stress disorder you have also taken that this inquiry to other populations like you've studied the children of women who survived the 911 attacks and where at certain points of pregnancy at that moment is that right yes. And so how it's because again I think the Holocaust such a singula