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How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives
Simon and Schuster
October 2010
On Sale: September 28, 2010
320 pages
ISBN: 0743296621
EAN: 9780743296625
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
What makes us the way we are? Some say it’s the genes we
inherit at conception. Others are sure it’s the environment
we experience in childhood. But could it be that many of our
individual characteristics—our health, our intelligence, our
temperaments—are influenced by the conditions we encountered
before birth?That’s the claim of an exciting and provocative
field known as fetal origins. Over the past twenty years,
scientists have been developing a radically new
understanding of our very earliest experiences and how they
exert lasting effects on us from infancy well into
adulthood. Their research offers a bold new view of
pregnancy as a crucial staging ground for our health,
ability, and well-being throughout life.Author and
journalist Annie Murphy Paul ventures into the laboratories
of fetal researchers, interviews experts from around the
world, and delves into the rich history of ideas about how
we’re shaped before birth. She discovers dramatic stories:
how individuals gestated during the Nazi siege of Holland in
World War II are still feeling its consequences decades
later; how pregnant women who experienced the 9/11 attacks
passed their trauma on to their offspring in the womb; how a
lab accident led to the discovery of a common household
chemical that can harm the developing fetus; how the study
of a century-old flu pandemic reveals the high personal and
societal costs of poor prenatal experience. Origins also
brings to light astonishing scientific findings: how a
single exposure to an environmental toxin may produce damage
that is passed on to multiple generations; how conditions as
varied as diabetes, heart disease, and mental illness may
get their start in utero; why the womb is medicine’s latest
target for the promotion of lifelong health, from preventing
cancer to reducing obesity. The fetus is not an inert being,
but an active and dynamic creature, responding and adapting
as it readies itself for life in the particular world it
will enter. The pregnant woman is not merely a source of
potential harm to her fetus, as she is so often reminded,
but a source of influence on her future child that is far
more powerful and positive than we ever knew. And pregnancy
is not a nine-month wait for the big event of birth, but a
momentous period unto itself, a cradle of individual
strength and wellness and a crucible of public health and
social equality. With the intimacy of a personal memoir and the sweep of a
scientific revolution, Origins presents a stunning new
vision of our beginnings that will change the way you think
about yourself, your children, and human nature itself.
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