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In his 1859 book “On the Origin of Species,” Charles Darwin envisioned evolution like a branching tree.

The most suggestive evidence for such transgenerational transmission may come from a macabre human experiment. In September, 1944, amid the most vengeful phase of the Second World War, German troops occupying the Netherlands banned the export of food and coal to its northern parts. Acute famine followed, called the Hongerwinter—the hunger winter. Tens of thousands of men, women, and children died of malnourishment; millions suffered it and survived. Not surprisingly, the children who endured the Hongerwinter experienced chronic health issues. In the nineteen-eighties, however, a curious pattern emerged: when the children born to women who were pregnant during the famine grew up, they had higher rates of morbidity as well—including obesity, diabetes, and mental illness. (Malnourishment in utero can cause the body to sequester higher amounts of fat in order to protect itself from caloric loss.) Methylation alterations were also seen in regions of their DNA associated with growth and development. But the oddest result didn’t emerge for another generation. A decade ago, when the grandchildren of men and women exposed to the famine were studied, they, too, were reported to have had higher rates of illness. (These findings have been challenged, and research into this cohort continues.) “Genes cannot change in an entire population in just two generations,” Allis said. “But some memory of metabolic stress could have become heritable.”

Perhaps the most tragic demonstration of this involved workers at the United States Radium Corporation factory in Orange, N.J., which in 1917 began hiring young women to paint watch faces with glow-in-the-dark radium paint. The workers were told that the paint was harmless and were encouraged to lick the paintbrushes to make them pointy enough to inscribe small numbers. In the years that followed, the women began to suffer ghoulish physical deterioration. Their jaws melted and ballooned into masses of tumors larger than fists, and cancers riddled their bodies. They developed anemia and necrosis. The sensational court case started — and won — by the dying Radium Girls, as they were called, is a landmark in the history of occupational health. It was settled in June 1928, four months before Marguerite Perey arrived at the Radium Institute to begin a 30-year career of heavy exposure to radiation.

I think she suspects she’s different. She asks me sometimes why she’s so much shorter than the rest of us, for example. I do my best to deflect her questions, but it hurts every time. My sister and I are very close, and we see each other often. Keeping this lie feels like a giant burden, but, at this point, I don’t know that it would do her any good to know the truth. She was recently diagnosed with bipolar disorder and has been working hard to keep her life balanced. Finding out now that she’s adopted could throw her into a depression. I fear, however, that with the mail-in DNA tests available these days, or should a medical emergency arise, she’ll find out the truth and she won’t forgive me.