Question about passing on deformaties

The_Minister

http://www.who.int/lep/research/Thalidomide.pdf
That report from the WHO says that children of people who suffer from Thalidomide caused deformities exibit similar deformaties.

I thought that this would be a once off poisen damage and could not be passed on.
Anyone want to explain this to me?

genegenie

In the WHO article you linked to, their references for second generation deformities are news articles and not research papers. This indicates that the evidence for this is purely anecdotal at present. Doesn't mean it isn't possible that thalidomide was to blame, but I'd remain skeptical. Perhaps the genetic deformities are due to some other heritable genetic condition that was falsely attributed to thalidomide.

Otherwise, perhaps thalidomide acts via an epigenetic mechanism which could be heritable... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics

All speculation at present unfortunately. Certainly an interesting observation which merits further research.

Kevster

Thanks for the article - very interesting. The only way I'm thinking that deformities could occur in the second-generation is if the drug affected germ cells (inheritable) in the parents of such individuals (whereas maybe it only affected somatic cells (non-inheritable) in the others).