How could a parent’s education level affect the telomeres of her developing baby? The answer is that telomeres are transgenerational. Parents can, of course, hand down genes that affect telomere length. But the really profound message is that parents have a second way of transmitting telomere length, known as direct transmission. Because of direct transmission, both parents’ telomeres—at whatever length they are at the time of conception in the egg and sperm—are passed to the developing baby (a form of epigenetics).
