Baby Rat Summary

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This article is about whether a person's psychological and behavioral tendencies are established by traumatic events an ancestor has been through. A molecular biologist, Moshe Szyf, and a neurobiologist, Michael Meany, began to experiment on mother rats to determine if postnatal inheritance had an effect on an animals' glucocorticoid receptors. The findings were quite interesting, baby rats with good mothering had the normal number of glucocorticoid receptors unlike the baby rats with bad mothering who lacked the sufficient number of glucocorticoid receptors. In order to prove their theory, Meany performed a second experiment. The baby rats were switched from their original attentive mothers to inattentive mothers and vice versa. Once again,

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