We are more than the sum of our genes. Environmental influences such as nutrition, trauma, illness or lifestyle are able to switch certain genes on or off. Scientists compare these new findings with the image of a piano: the strings and keys represent the genes, but the melody of life only sounds when the keys are struck. Thus, the findings of epigenetics overturn a long-held dogma of biology: the idea that the properties of an organism are immutably determined by inherited genetic matter.
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