A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes

by Adam Rutherford

Because this horror happened during the modern age, with record keeping and an understanding of public health, and also during the period of rationing, the Nazis had effectively executed an experiment that we could or would never do. They had asked the question: ‘What happens to people when you profoundly starve them?’ Many of the results, though tragic, are not very surprising. People who lived through the famine suffered a collection of health problems, from the physiological to the psychiatric. Audrey Hepburn was fifteen at the time and endured the Hongerwinter like so many others, making flour for bread and biscuits out of dried tulip bulbs. As an adult she described surviving the starvation with anaemia, respiratory problems and oedema, and attributed health problems throughout her life to the malnutrition she endured in 1944. These conditions are all miserably predictable. Their DNA was already set in place. But the unborn would face a different set of problems. For children in utero, maternal malnutrition has an effect on the expression of their genes, which would be altered and disrupted. The result for the children of the Hongerwinter was a set of health problems that would persist throughout their lives. Compared to the general population, and compared to siblings who were conceived either before or after the famine, they were smaller and underweight. They were more likely to be obese, diabetic, schizophrenic, and suffer from cardiovascular diseases and breast ca...