[MUSIC PLAYING]
BIANCA JONES MARLIN: An interesting
and, I think, humbling experience
is to see yourself reflected in another individual.
They're going to have their own life experiences.
But you look at them, and you see yourself
in the color of their eyes and the way their nose wrinkles.
I have a two-year-old daughter.
SPEAKER 1: [GIGGLES]
BIANCA JONES MARLIN: She's taken care of by biology,
by her parents.
And that's just beautiful that we
are set up for success and survival in that manner.
And, yet, life is dynamic, and the experience
can sometimes be messy.
What happens when things go wrong, and how do we fix that?
I had the amazing opportunity to grow up
in a very dynamic family.
SPEAKER 2: Hey!
SPEAKER 3: Hi.
BIANCA JONES MARLIN: My biological parents
were also foster parents.
And so I had the opportunity to grow up with many siblings.
SPEAKER 4: You've had over 20-some-odd siblings living
here. BIANCA JONES MARLIN: [INAUDIBLE]
SPEAKER 4: They learned to work with each other.
They had some good days, and they had some sibling days.
BIANCA JONES MARLIN: At night, when we went to bed,
I heard where my siblings came from
and what they had to go through in order
to be put in foster care.
There were stories of abuse, of not
getting the proper nutrition, the proper care
that a child would need.
Young kids shouldn't always had to go through the things they
go through.
So I almost feel as if it's my obligation to, I don't know,
do something about it.
Taking my passion for science and what I've learned from them
and putting them together is really my end goal.
My name is Bianca Jones Marlin.
I'm a researcher at Columbia University,
and I study how trauma is passed down through generations.
During my graduate studies, I explored maternal behavior,
specifically in female mice.
In the case of the non-moms, when
a pup is removed from its comfortable nest
and begins to cry, she'll leave it there.
And, at times, she'll even cannibalize the pup.
However, if a mom is present in the nest,
even if it's not the mother of that pup, she'll go
and she'll pick the pup up.
And she'll bring it back to the nest.
So the goal of our study was to explore
what was happening in the brain, what
was responsible for that transition.
When we treated mice who have never given birth
with oxytocin, well above and beyond what the mice originally
had, what we observed was astounding.
We not only saw changes in the way
their neurons fired and spoke to each other
in the hearing centers of the brain.
The mice would not ignore the pup
or cannibalize the pup but go to the pup
up and bring the pup back to the nest.
Prior to being a mother, my work in oxytocin
still was so close to my heart, knowing
that my siblings had parents who couldn't be the best moms
and dads to them.
And why could that be?
What is a, quote unquote, bad or good parent?
And how can we aid in that process?
So my work now focuses on the stressors
that you seemingly can't escape, how
stress can affect not just an individual but subsequent
generations.
All of the cells in the body have
what we call epigenetic regulation, which means
the cells know what they should and shouldn't be.
But certain experiences, the environment
can change what genes are expressed and not expressed.
That's because DNA actually is just the recipe,
but it doesn't make the cake.
Markers around the DNA say, you can't touch this piece.
Or now you have access to the DNA, you'll become a protein.
So our genes don't change.
But the things around our genes that make our genes work or not
can change to adapt to the environment.
So, at the end of World War II, an experience
called the Dutch Hunger Winter occurred.
And, during this time, people in the Netherlands
were starved of food.
Their children and their grandchildren
were observed to suffer from increased rates
of metabolic issues, for example, diabetes, high blood
pressure, and even schizophrenia.
It wasn't just children that were conceived
during the famine but children that were conceived afterwards,
as if the sex cells, the sperm cells and the egg cells,
had a memory of that trauma, of that stress
well beyond the years of famine.
It really did spark questions in the scientific community
of, how can a memory, a message live on in sperm and egg?
And how is it being passed down?
So that's an example of transgenerational epigenetic
inheritance.
There have been a lot of questions
surrounding epigenetics, transgenerational epigenetics.
And that's because we're studying humans.
A lot of this has to do with what we are reporting
and our experiences with life.
And so it's really hard to get pristine, clean data
from history and experience.
But, when it comes to mice, we can take mice and put them
in a controlled environment, where
the only thing that should be different
is experience that they're having.
My angle as a scientist is to make things better.
And, in this case, it's how to make a bad experience less
traumatizing and traumatic for the organism
and for subsequent generations.
And, in order to make things better,
we first have to figure out what happens when things go wrong.
And so what if we made a stressful situation with mice?
How does that change the way their brain responds?
This question started our experiments
that we're doing now.
They rely on smell very heavily.
Neurons sense when a smell comes into their nose,
like the smell of almond, and they begin to fire.
And they'll tell other neurons in the brain
that this is the smell of almond.
And so what we do is we have the almond paired with shock.
After the experience, the mouse starts to avoid that smell.
We then go and look at the actual brain,
and the cells in the nose actually
respond to chemicals in the air.
Structure of the cells are still there, they're still present.
But we can see through the bone, and we can see through the fat.
And we can look at just the cells.
From there, we put this tissue on something
called a light-sheet microscope.
We're able to look at the whole tissue,
and we're able to have a 3D rendering of the nose
and a beautiful image of the actual cells in the nose.
Everything that's in green here are
cells that respond to almond.
These are the first cells that say, oh, I smell something.
And it sends that message to the brain.
We go through, and we count how many cells are in the tissue.
So, in the parents, after about a month,
we start to see an increase in these cells that
respond to the almond smell.
And this is work that we're following up on,
former labs have shown, and we're looking
at the mechanisms behind that.
What's really exciting is that the pups
seem to already be born with more cells that
respond to almond.
Because male mice are constantly creating sperm,
this means that the experience is not just
living in the sperm that's present
but somehow is living somewhere in the body
and informing the sperm to make sure
that all subsequent generations are getting this message.
So males, without ever meeting their offspring,
just having their sperm passed onto the second generation,
those offspring have altered brains
because of the experience that their father went through.
So it's a beautiful situation in which
biology is preparing us for an environment that may or may not
be there.
And I think that's where the problem lies.
Does this smell then elicit a response
that it shouldn't elicit because there's
no actual stressor there?
But this is a proxy to the human experience
because, during a traumatic event,
we are still using senses to create those memories.
And what we're exploring is if these memories are actually
then passed down to the subsequent generations
and what that would look like biologically.
When we look at our data, it's a little bit nerve
racking because I go back and I think about how an experience I
could have can be passed on.
and not just an experience that I have
but that my husband, an experience that he
could have had well before he met me, could still live on.
And that could affect our offspring.
We don't know.
And that's the exciting and terrifying part.
It needs to be answered.
Me, personally, being Black American,
knowing that my ancestors went through trauma for generations
on generations. If my work can inform
any aspect of the opportunity to live a safe, happy, just life,
then I'm happy with the direction
in which my work is going.