Legacy and Lifestyle: Epigenetics and the Potential for Chiropractic

There weren't many exciting days in my high-school biology class. The class was interesting, though, and we had an excellent teacher. One day stands out in my memory. The excitement in the teacher's voice was contagious. He brought forth a model from the back room and carried it to the demonstration table in the front of the lab. We were told the story of Watson and Crick's work on the double helix – DNA – and that it was the "blueprint of life."

Our teacher could hardly contain his enthusiasm for sharing the secret of life with us, describing how the sequencing of the pyrimidines cytosine and thymine, and the purines adenine and guanine, encoded our identities and our futures. This was cutting-edge stuff in the '60s, and we were mesmerized.

The "dogma of genetic supremacy" followed me from high school to college and then professional school. Even in chiropractic classes, it was suggested that the "limitations of matter" were defined by our genetic legacy. But there was something brewing shortly after I left my teaching position at Palmer in 1979. Guy Riekeman and Joe Flesia held a symposium at which I first heard the term epigenetic. The environment, we were taught, determined gene expression. The speaker was Ron Pero, PhD. Little did I suspect that one day I would co?author a paper with him on DNA repair and chiropractic care.1

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