A New Slant on Old Ideas Do genes define your destiny? The field of epigenetics examines how genes and the environment interact to form the basis of heredity and comes up with some surprising findings. We often think of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) as the sole physical basis for heredity, the genetic code that determines everything from eye and hair color to specific personality traits. The growing field of epigenetics suggests that this traditional paradigm is an oversimplification. Epigenetics is the study of factors that are heritable, but which occur by mechanisms other than changes in the DNA code itself. C.H. Waddington first used the term epigenetics in the early 1940s to describe "the interactions of genes with their environment, which bring the phenotype into being." Epi-
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