Epigenetics: Embracing The Role It Plays In Your Life

Seventy-five years ago, Joseph Stalin's henchmen (the NKVD) came pounding on my Polish family's door in Eastern Poland. It wasn't until 2012, after a series of serendipitous events, that I decided it was time for me to do some knocking on a few doors myself--the doors of history. My journey thrust me into a fascinating new Universe to explore a vivid trifecta that revolved around the themes of "home," "place" and "epigenetics"--and much more, but it always brought me back to that troika. This was such a far distance away from the work I had been doing for more than a decade as entertainment journalist and editor, covering red carpet events and gobbling up Hollywood. Sure, interviewing the stars like Ewan McGregor, Chelsea Handler and Chris Pine was fun. Probing into Stalin, the effect his decisions had on my family, as well as the former Soviet dictator's mass deportation of more than 1 million Poles and how my family's own survival of Stalin's insanity could somehow being playing out in my own emotional life? Not so fun. In a sense, I had gone from Glitz to Gulags. I wrote about my journey uncovering my family's odyssey in the book, "Grace Revealed," which was released earlier this year to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Polish Deportations. Initially, I was going to write a story that was more academic--this event happened to these people and it went underreported for so many years because Stalin became our ally during World War II and well, what was the point in...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news