Question: What is the most important discovery that you have ever made?

Simon Langley-Evans answered on 11 Nov 2013:

The most important discovery that I made was about how mums diet in pregnancy affects the health not just of her children, but her grandchildren. It went like this:

1. We fed pregnant rats a diet that was low in protein and their babies had high blood pressure and abnormal kidneys.
2. We took those babies and fed them normally and then we bred them to get a second generation. In this new generation, the ones whose grandmothers had been fed the low protein diet also had high blood pressure and abnormal kidneys.
3. We bred a third generation and the babies whose great-grandmothers had been fed the low protein diet had high blood pressure.

This amazed me as it means that if the same thing happens in humans, the way your kidneys work and your blood pressure may still be responding to what an ancestor ate when she was pregnant maybe 100 years ago!