Blog - Epigenetics
Lez Graham discusses Epigenetics
How a Mouse Led Me to Epigenetics
I recently completed my Diploma in Epigenetics and was delighted to come away with a distinction.
I've since had a couple of folk ask "why Epigenetics?" when I spend my days talking about dogs.
Well...
My interest in epigenetics actually started over twenty-five years ago when I was a kinesiologist. One of the modalities we learned in Three In One Concepts was something called Generations.
The idea was that certain fears, emotional responses and behavioural patterns appeared to pass from one generation to the next. At the time there wasn't any science to explain it, and plenty of people dismissed it as "wacky hippie stuff" in the way that a lot of the healing modalities back then were dismissed.
Years later, while teaching the Level 4 Diploma in Canine Behaviour & Welfare, I came across a fascinating study by Dias and Ressler (2014).
I recently completed my Diploma in Epigenetics and was delighted to come away with a distinction.
I've since had a couple of folk ask "why Epigenetics?" when I spend my days talking about dogs.
Well...
My interest in epigenetics actually started over twenty-five years ago when I was a kinesiologist. One of the modalities we learned in Three In One Concepts was something called Generations.
The idea was that certain fears, emotional responses and behavioural patterns appeared to pass from one generation to the next. At the time there wasn't any science to explain it, and plenty of people dismissed it as "wacky hippie stuff" in the way that a lot of the healing modalities back then were dismissed.
Years later, while teaching the Level 4 Diploma in Canine Behaviour & Welfare, I came across a fascinating study by Dias and Ressler (2014).
The researchers exposed male mice to a sweet, cherry-like smell called acetophenone and paired it with a mild electric foot shock. The mice quickly learned to fear that smell.
But that wasn't the part that caught my eye... what really grabbed my attention was that the offspring of those mice that had never experienced the electric shocks were more sensitive to that same smell.
The researchers also identified changes in the fathers' sperm and in the part of the brain responsible for detecting that particular odour.
I remember thinking, "This sounds familiar"
Actually, I think I said 'what the f..." out loud and then went and told Kenny about it.
So, keeping it simple, epigenetics is the study of how our experiences and environment can influence the way our genes are expressed without changing the DNA sequence itself.
If you think of your DNA as an instruction manual, epigenetics doesn't rewrite the manual, but it can place little chemical markers on it that influence which parts of the manual are more likely to be read.
Scientists are still working to understand exactly how some of these changes can be inherited, which is one of the reasons the field is moving so quickly.
And I found it absolutely fascinating. Not because I thought it proved everything I'd learned years earlier, as it didn't, but it was more that science was beginning to investigate questions that, years before, many people had simply dismissed as being too far-fetched.
Remember I, Robot?
When that film came out in 2004, self-driving cars felt firmly in the realm of science fiction; now, twenty years later, driverless taxis are beginning to appear on London's streets, while more than a hundred autonomous robots quietly deliver shopping around Milton Keynes every day. The future has a habit of arriving quietly, and what once seemed impossible slowly becomes normal without us really noticing.
A couple of years after discovering this research, I started to study epigenetics properly, but I had to put it to one side as there was so much genetics and molecular biology that I simply couldn't get my head around it.
After finishing my Quantum Physics diploma a few months ago, I decided to try it again, thinking it can't be more mind-blowing than what I've just been studying. I was wrong - it was right up there...
But this time something clicked, and I managed to put an hour aside every night to work my way through it.
There's a time to learn, and there's a time to be
Sometimes you're not in the right space to learn something new, and we need a bit more time where we are before trying again.
That's kind of where I am with Faelan at the minute too.
Earlier in the year he wasn't in the right space to get over his worries about flappy things; now, I think he might well be as we've got a row of bunting flapping around in the garden and he's happily playing the Out and Back game under it.
While he's happy to learn, I'll help him to do so, and when he needs more time we'll take our foot off the gas and slow down a bit...
Me?
I'm still very much in the learning zone at the minute, which no doubt you'll hear more about in the not too distant future.
References
Dias, B. G., & Ressler, K. J. (2014). Parental olfactory experience influences behavior and neural structure in subsequent generations. Nature Neuroscience, 17(1), 89-96.
Available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.3594
Accessed: 20th July 2026
first published 23 July 2026
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