Early Development And Late Life Illness
(From Medical News Today). The Reliability Theory of aging suggests that we are born with a surprisingly large amount of cellular or genetic damage - or vulnerabilities that lead to the same long term effects as damage. Modern bioinformatics, genetic toolkits and embryonic stem cells allow researchers to investigate how this might happen: "We are trying to identify the primary factors that influence the methylation process and which therefore might affect an unborn child's long-term susceptibility to certain diseases in later life. We can use unspecialised stem cells to study the effect of [maternal] diet on the tagging of the DNA and then induce them to develop into a cell type such a heart cell to see whether the effect is still there."
Link: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=18739