A famine during pregnancy left a chemical mark on babies that lasted 60 years

People conceived during the 1944–45 Dutch famine, when their mothers were severely malnourished in early pregnancy, showed measurable differences in DNA methylation near a growth gene — detected decades later, in late adulthood. It's one of the clearest human examples of environment leaving a lasting biochemical trace without altering the DNA sequence itself.

— Bastiaan T. Heijmans et al., Persistent Epigenetic Differences Associated with Prenatal Exposure to Famine in Humans — Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2008