The last couple of months, we’ve talked a lot about the biopsychosocial model and how it explains some of the more complicated expressions of the brain. But biopsychosocial influences affect much more than just our brains. In fact, in the past few decades, there has been growing evidence that factors like environment and behavior can affect our bodies on a molecular level—through epigenetic markers. The term epigenetic refers to all of the molecular markers and modifications that change the way your DNA is read and interpreted. If DNA is the blueprint of life, then epigenetic markers are the labels and…
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Up next in our series on women who reshaped science is Marie Maynard Daly—the first Black woman in America to earn a PhD in Chemistry. At a time when scientists were only just discovering the function of DNA as hereditary material, Daly made many foundational discoveries about the chemical structure of nucleic acids and histones—the proteins that DNA wraps around. Perhaps even more influential though are Daly’s studies investigating the health impacts of cholesterol and sugar. Daly was one of the first scientists to discover the link between cholesterol and hypertension, which can lead to heart attacks. Her work as…
Continue readingThe Ghosts of Science Past: Part 2—Marie Maynard Daly and the Dangers of Cholesterol
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