Are genes our puppet masters, or just a single link in a complex chain?

In addition to DNA sequences, the structures that compact DNA can be passed on as cells divide. This is called epigenetic inheritance.

Penn State

The afternoon sessions at the Nobel Week Dialogue covered a lot of ground, which was inevitable if you put six extremely smart people on the stage, give them a topic, and set them loose. Although there's no way to summarize the full conversation, it's possible to pull out some important themes that the speakers returned to. I'll attempt to do that for the discussion on genetics and the environment.

One of the things that became clear at this panel (and more generally through the day) is that we may have become a bit sloppy in our thinking about heritable and environmental influences on human health and behavior. If we don't attempt to form clear hypotheses and demand evidence to support them, there's a chance that we'll end up accepting things that appeal to our personal biases.

That may sound a bit dry, but it played out in dramatic fashion across the course of the panel, in part because of the prickly presence of James Watson.