A 2021 interview with McGill University’s Moshe Szyf:

“There is a rejection of transgenerational inheritance as it goes against progressive thinking because it ties us to previous generations. The theory faces rejection because it sounds deterministic.

But if you understand what epigenetics is, it’s not deterministic. There is stability, and there’s also room for dynamic change.

The only way things change in the body for the long term is via epigenetics. We don’t know everything yet, new discoveries are yet to happen, and then we will just say, ‘Wow, it’s so obvious!’

The immune system is tightly connected to the brain and is directly affected by early adversity. Even though we will not be able to learn what’s going on in the brain, as far as epigenetics in living people, we will gain a lot of information from how the immune system responds to early adversity, and how this is correlated with behavioral phenotype and with mental health.

This brings into question the whole field of neuroimmunology, of which there is a lot of data. But it seems that a lot of psychiatrists are totally oblivious to these data, which is astounding, because the glucocorticoid hormone – the major player in this mechanism due to its involvement in early life stress as well as control of behavior – also controls immune function.

Nobody can live long enough to oversee a human transgenerational study. In humans, correlations are usually in peripheral tissue, where changes are small. The jury’s not out yet, but if evolution used it for so many different organisms, some of which are very close to us in the evolutionary ladder, it’s impossible that humans don’t use it.

How are current findings in animal models relevant to humans? How do we develop human paradigms that will allow us to achieve a higher level of evidence than what we have now?

• One way is the immune-inflammatory connection to other diseases. I think this is where the secret of epigenetic aging lies, as well as epigenetics of other diseases.
• Every disease is connected to the immune system. The brain translates the behavioral environment to the immune system, and then the immune system sends chemical signals across the body to respond to these challenges.

We need to understand that epigenetic programs are a network. Move beyond candidate genes, understand the concept of a network, and really understand the challenge: Reset the epigenetic network.

Epigenetics is going to be rapidly translated to better predictors, better therapeutics, and more interesting therapeutics. Not necessarily the traditional drug modeled against a crystal structure of an enzyme, but a more networked approach. Ideas about early life stress are critical and have impacted the field of childcare by highlighting the importance of early childhood relationships.”

https://www.futuremedicine.com/doi/10.2217/epi-2021-0483 “The epigenetics of early life adversity and trauma inheritance: an interview with Moshe Szyf”