Genes & the Inheritance of Memories Across Generations | Dr. Oded Rechavi

Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today my guest is Dr. Oded Rehavi. Dr. Oded Rehavi is a professor of Neurobiology at Tel Aviv University in Israel. His laboratory studies genetic inheritance. Now, everybody is familiar with genetic inheritance as the idea that we inherit genes from our parents. And indeed that is true. Many people are also probably now aware of the so called epigenome, that is ways in which our environment and experiences can change our genome and therefore the genes that we inherit or pass on to our children. What is less known, however, and what is discussed today is the evidence that we can actually pass on traits that relate to our experiences. That's right, there is evidence in worms, in flies, in in mice and indeed in human beings that memories can indeed be passed from one generation to the next. And that turns out to be just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how our parents experiences and our experiences can be passed on from one generation to the next, both in terms of modifying the biological circuits of the brain and body and the psychological consequences of those biological changes. During today's episode, Dr. Rahavi gives us a beautiful description of how genetics work. So so even if you don't have a background in biology or science, by the end of today's episode you will understand the core elements of genetics and the genetic passage of traits from one generation to the next. In addition, he makes it clear how certain experiences can indeed modify our genes such that they are passed from our parents to us and even transgenerationally across multi generations. That is, one generation could experience something and their grandchildren would still have genetic modifications that reflect their those prior experiences of their grandparents. Dr. Rajavi takes us on an incredible journey explaining how our genes and different patterns of inheritance shape our experience of life and who we are. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Roka. Roka makes eyeglasses and sunglasses that are of the absolute highest quality. The company was founded by two all American swimmers from Stanford and everything about Roka eyeglasses and sunglasses were designed with performance in mind. I'VE spent a lifetime working on the biology of the visual system, and I can tell you that your visual system has to contend with an enormous number of challenges in order for you to be able to see clearly under any conditions. Roka understands this and has designed their eyeglasses and sunglasses accordingly. Originally, Roka eyeglasses and sunglasses were designed for sport, that is for things like running and cycling, and many of the features they have reflect that. So, for instance, they are extremely lightweight, they won't slip off your face if you get sweaty, and they can indeed be worn for running and cycling and things of that sort. However, they also come in a number of different aesthetics and styles that make them perfectly suited not just for sport, but also for wearing to the office to work. If you'd like to try Roka eyeglasses or sunglasses, go to roka, that's roka.com and enter the code huberman to save 20% off your first order. Again, that's roka roka.com enter the code huberman at checkout. Today's episode is also brought to us by HVMN Ketone IQ Ketone IQ is a ketone supplement that increases blood ketones. Most everybody has heard of the so called ketogenic diet. Most people, including myself, do not follow a ketogenic diet. That does not, however, mean that ketones cannot be valuable because ketones are one of the primary sources of brain fuel and body fuel that allows us to think clearly for long durations of time and to perform well physically. Which is all to say that even if you're somebody who's not on a ketogenic diet such as myself, increasing your blood ketones can be immensely beneficial for cognitive and physical performance. Indeed, that's how I use Ketone iq. I'll take one or two servings per day, typically sometimes before a workout, but most typically before doing a bout of cognitive work. So I'm going to sit down and prepare a podcast or focus on research from my lab or a writing project, or anything that requires a high degree of concentration for a prolonged period of time. Ingesting Ketone IQ prior to that, I've noticed, greatly increases my level of concentration and I can sustain that concentration for much longer periods of time than if I don't take Ketone IQ. If you'd like to try Ketone IQ, you can go to hvmn.comhuberman to save 20% off. Again, that's hvmn.comhuberman Today's episode is also brought to us by Eight Sleep Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating and sleep tracking capacity so I've talked about many times before on the podcast. There's a critical relationship between sleep and temperature and indeed between waking up and temperature. That is, your body temperature needs to decrease by about 1 to 3 degrees in order for you to fall and stay deeply asleep at night. And when you wake up in the morning, in order to do that feeling refreshed, your body temperature actually needs to increase by about 1 to 3 degrees. So it's critical that you control the temperature of your sleeping environment and that that temperature be controlled very specifically across the night and into the morning. With eight Sleep mattress covers, that's all extremely easy to do. You can program the temperature of your mattress in the beginning and throughout the night and when you wake up. I've been sleeping on an eight Sleep mattress cover for over a year now and it has greatly improved the quality of my sleep. And indeed I know that because eight Sleep also includes a terrific sleep tracker built directly into that mattress cover. If you'd like to try Eight Sleep, you can go to eight sleep.comhuberman to save $150 off their Pod 3 cover. Eight Sleep currently ships in the USA, Canada, UK, select countries in the EU and Australia. Again, that's eightsleep.comhuberman and now for my discussion with Dr. Oded Rahavi.

Oded, thank you so much for being here.

Totally my pleasure.

Yeah, this podcast has a somewhat unusual origin because I am familiar with your work, but we essentially met on Twitter where you are known for many things, but lately especially you have been focusing not just on the discoveries in your laboratory and other laboratories, but also sort of meme type humor that relates to the scientific process. And we'll return to this a little bit later. But first of all, I think it's wonderful that you're so active on social media in this positive stance around science that also includes humor. But today what I mainly want to talk about is the incredible questions that you probe in your lab, which are highly unusual, incredibly significant for each and all of our lives, and very controversial and at times even a little bit dangerous or morbid. So this is going to be a fun one for me and for the audience. Just to start off, very basically get everyone up to speed because people have different backgrounds. I think most people have a general understanding of what genes are, what RNA is, and so on, but maybe you could explain to people in very basic terms. And I'll just preface all this by saying that I think most people understand that if they have two blue eyed parents, that there's a higher probability that their offspring will have blue eyes than brown eyes. Similarly, if two brown eyed parents higher probability that they have brown eyes rather than blue eyes, and so on. But that most people generally understand and accept that if they spend part of their life, let's say, studying architecture, that if they have children that there's no real genetic reason. We assume that their children would somehow be better at architecture because they contain the knowledge through the DNA of their parents. They might be exposed to it in the home, so called nature, nurture as a nurture in that case, but that they wouldn't inherit knowledge or other traits. And today I'm hoping you can explain to us why eye color, but not knowledge is thought to be inherited. And the huge landscape of interesting questions that this opens up, including some evidence that contrary to what we might think, certain types of knowledge at the level of cells and systems can be inherited. So that was a very long winded opening. But to frame things up, what is DNA? What is rna and how does inheritance really work?

Okay, so DNA is the material, the genetic instructions that is containing every one of our cells. We have the set of genes containing the entire set is called the genome. And this is present in every cell of our body. The same set of instructions and genes are made of DNA and they also contain and chromosomes. They are containing chromosomes. Chromosomes is the DNA and the proteins that condense the DNA. Because we have a huge amount of DNA in every cell that you need to condense it to sort of like.

Thread on a spool, right?

Huge amounts that you have to condense. And we have the same genome, the same DNA in every cell in our body.

Can I just interrupt and I'll do that periodically just to make sure that people are being carried along. I sometimes find that even remarkable that a skin cell and a brain cell, a neuron, for instance, very different functions, but they all contain the full menu of genes. And the same menu of genes.

No, it is amazing. It is amazing. And perhaps it's good to have an analogy to understand how it works. So this is, I hope this is not a commercial, but this is like the IKEA book that you have in every cell in your body the instructions to make everything that you need in your house, the chairs, the kitchen, the pictures. But in every room you want something else. So in the kitchen you want things that fit the kitchen, and in the toilet you want things that fit the toilet. So you only remove one particular page of instructions, which is instructions of how to Build a chair. And this you place in the living room. And the toilet, you put in the toilet. So the DNA is the instruction to make. The genome is the instruction to make everything. This is the E Care book. And in every cell, we take just instructions for make one particular furniture. And this is the rna. This is the rna. This is the set, and then the end, you'll build a chair. The chair is the protein. So the RNA are instructions to make one particular protein based on the entire set of possibilities. And this is true for one particular type of rna, which won't be the star of this conversation, which is messenger rna. This is the RNA that contains information for making proteins. In fact, this is just a small percent of the RNA in the cell. So we have a very big genome, and less than 2% of it encodes for this messenger RNA. However, a lot of the genome is transcribed to make RNA that does other things. Some of these RNAs we understand, and many of them we don't.

I think it's a beautiful description. And IKEA is not a sponsor of the podcast, so it's totally fair game to use the IKEA catalog as the analogy for DNA. The specific instructions for specific pieces of furniture is the rna, and the furniture pieces being the proteins that are essentially made from RNA using messenger rna.

Right.

Okay, thank you for that. So despite the fact that the same genes are contained in all the cells of the body, there is a difference between certain cell types. Right. Is it fair to say that there is basically one very important exception, which is somatic cells versus germ cells. And would you mind sharing with us what that distinction is?

Sure. So, yes, every cell, every cell type is different because it expresses. It brings into action different genes from the entire collection and assumes an identity. And so we have cells in the legs, we have cells in the brain. We have in the brain, we have cells that produce dopamine, cells that produce serotonin, and so on. And we can make different separations, different distinctions, but we can make one very important distinction between the somatic cells and the germ cells. The germ cells are supposed to be the only cells that contribute to the next generation, out of which the next generation will be made. So each of us is made just from a combination of a sperm and an egg. These are two types of germ cells, and then they fuse, and you get one fertilized egg. And out of this one cell, all the rest of the body will develop. And what happens in the soma, which are all the cells that are not the germ Cells should stay in the soma should not be able to contribute to the next generation. This is very important, and it's thought to be one of the main barriers for the inheritance of acquired traits, the inheritance of memory and so on. Because, for example, the. Like the example that you gave with learning architecture. If I learn about architecture, the information is encoded in my brain. And since my brain cells can't transfer information to the sperm and the egg, because the information is supposed to reside in synaptic connections between different neurons in particular circuits that developed. So what happens is the brain shouldn't be able to transfer to the next place generation. Even simpler, a simpler example, if you go to the gym and you build up muscles, you know that your kids will have to work out on their own. This shortcut won't happen. This is something that we know intuitively, even if we don't have any background in biology. And this is connected to the fact that, as we said at the beginning, every cell in the body has its own genome. And the next generation will only form from the combination of the genomes in the sperm and the egg. Even if you somehow acquire the mutation or a change in your DNA in one of particular brain cells, it wouldn't matter, because this mutation, there's no way to transfer it to the DNA of the germ cells that will contribute to the next generation.

So despite that, there is, as you will tell us, some evidence for inheritance of experience, let's call it, or. And here we have to be careful with the language. I just want to put a big asterisk and underline and highlight that the language around what we're about to talk about is both confusing and at the same time, fairly simple and controversial.

Right?

It's a little bit like in the field of longevity, people sometimes will say anti aging. Some people say longevity. The anti aging folks feel that longevity is more about longevity clinics. They don't like that anti aging is related to some other kind of niche clinics, sometimes FDA approved or government approved, sometimes not. And so there's a lot of argument about the naming, but it's all about living longer and living healthier. In this field of acquiring traits or the passage of information to offspring, what is the proper language to refer to what we're about to discuss? There is this idea, and I'll say it so that you don't have to, that dates back to Lamarck and Lamarckian evolution. Very controversial, right? And maybe not even controversial. I think it's very offensive even to certain people, this idea of inheritance, of acquired Traits, the idea that one could change themselves through some activity. Use the example of going to the gym. We could also use the example of somebody who becomes an endurance runner, then decides to have children within another endurance runner and has in mind the idea that because they did all this running, and not just because they were biased towards running in the first place, but.

Because of the distance they actually ran.

That their offspring somehow would be fabulous runners. Okay, this Lamarckian concept is, we believe, wrong. So how do we talk about inheritance of acquired traits? What's the proper language for us to frame this discussion?

Right. We have to be very careful, as you said, and there are many complications and many ambiguities.

And maybe you could tell us why Lamarckian evolution, for those that don't know, is such a stained thing. It's not polite.

Right. Perhaps we'll start with just to just say that we can talk about inheritance, acquired traits, transmission of parental responses, inheritance of memory, all of these things. And we can also talk about epigenetics and transgenerational epigenetics and intergenerational epigenetics. There are many terms that we need to make clear for the audience. The reason that is so toxic or controversial is very complicated and goes a long time back, even way before Lamarck. So even the Greeks talked about inheritance acquired traits. Lamarck is associated with the term, but it's probably a mistake, although everyone talks about, including people who study it. So Lamarck worked, he published his book about a little more than 200 years ago and he believed in inheritance, acquired traits. Absolutely. But just like anyone else in his time, just everyone believed in. Seemed obvious to them that it was long before Mendel and the rules of genetic inheritance. And also Mendel was long before the understanding that DNA is the heritable material. This happened a long time ago. Everyone believed in it, including Darwin. Darwin was perhaps more Lamarckian than Lamarck. Really? Yes, absolutely.

All right, now we're getting into the meat of it.

And this is in the Origin of Species, it's in all of his writings. Lamarck didn't even really make the distinction between the generations. He had many other reasons for being wrong. But he connected the terms inheritance of acquired traits to evolution. And this is some of the reasons that he was very controversial, even in his time. There were other reasons. For example, he rejected current day chemistry and thought that he can explain everything based on Aristotelian fluids, Earth, wind, fire and water.

There's still some people on the Internet that think they can discard with chemistry and explain Everything based on earth, wind wire and fog.

And this wasn't only biology, it was also the weather and everything. So that was part of the reason. But Lamarck, so Lamarck made many mistakes, but he did have a full tier of inheritance which was a big step towards where we are today. So he had important contributions nevertheless, although he was mistaken about the mechanism, what he believed, like everyone else drives evolution is the transmission of the traits that you acquire during your life or the things that you do or don't do. He talked about use and disuse of certain organs that shape our organs and eventually also the organs of the next generation.

He sounds a little bit like the first self help public figure. Right. Well, this idea, you know, I mean this is heavily embedded into a lot of the health and fitness space on the Twitter and Instagram and on the Internet, which is that. And it's, and it's the idea that we're sold very early in life, at least here in the United States and probably elsewhere, which is that we can become anything that we want to become and then that will forever change the offspring, either because of nature or nurture.

Right. And this is a very dangerous idea, as I'll explain in a second. And it led to horrible things. This is part of the reason that this is such a taboo. It's not only self help you're helping or this helping yourself. The problem is when you apply to others. And this happened in a very, very dramatic and horrible way in the recent past, as I'll tell in a second. So Lamarck, this is what he believed and he thought this is how evolution progressed. And later Darwin showed that it's really natural selection, the selecting of the people, of the organisms that are already, that already contain the particular qualities, are selected based on whether they survive or not in particular environments. And therefore their evolution progresses. They become more common and take over. This is very different, two different explanations. The most common way this is contrasted is the neck of the giraffes. This is the classic example. According to Lamarck, the giraffes had to stretch their necks towards the trees to eat when the trees were high. And because of that they transmitted these traits, long necks, to their children, who also had long necks, by the way, he only mentioned this example a handful of times. He didn't really focus on that. And according to Darwin, just a giraffe that happened to be born with a long neck survived because it ate. So it's genetic heritable material, didn't know about genetics, but take over and the rest of the Giraffes that have different heritable materials just die. So this is natural selection versus inheritance of aquarites. There are many reasons why Lamarckism and inheritance of aquarites became such a bad term. One of the biggest is what happened in the Soviet Union under Stalin. There was a scientist called Lysenko who thought that Mendelism, normal genetics, is bourgeois science, shouldn't be done. And whoever did normal genetics was either killed or sent to Siberia. And he thought that just like you said, not only we can become everything that we want, but we can grow everything that we want in every field. We can take a frozen field and grow potatoes there and so on. And this led to massive starvation, ruin. Agriculture in the Soviet Union also ruined science for many, many years and put a very dark cloud on the entire field. And only probably in the 80s or something like this, the field started to recuperate for that. Aside from that, which is a very dramatic thing, there was also crazy stories around attempts to prove the inheritance or acquired traits. Despite the realization of many scientists, this is something that is very rare or that normally doesn't happen. That is not a normal way that inheritance works. And I can tell you about two such dramatic cases that will illustrate it.

Yeah, please.

So in the Beginning of the 20th century in Vienna, there was a researcher called Paul Kamrer, was a very famous and also very colorful figure who did experiments on many different types of animals. He did experiments on toads that are called the midwife toad because the male carries the eggs. And there's a beautiful book about it from Kessler, telling the story of what happened there. And there are a couple of types of toads. Some of them live underwater and some of them live on land. And these toads are different in the shape and in their behavior. So, of course, the capacity to live underwater is one thing, but also the morphology and appearance changes. The toads that live underwater develop these nupital pads, these black pads on their hands that allow the males to grab onto the female without sleeping.

For mating.

For mating. And the ones on land don't have them. He claimed that he can take the toads and train them to live underwater, changing the temperature and all kinds of things. It's a very difficult animal to work with. Eventually, according to camera, they will acquire the capacity to live underwater and also change their physiology and develop these black nepetal pants of their heads. With this discovery, he traveled the world, became very famous. This was just the beginning of the previous century as the person who found the proof for inheritance of acquired traits. Despite the controversy and so on, and the beginning of their realization of how it actually works with DNA and so on. Not with DNA, but with the natural selection. DNA came later, and people didn't believe him. He was actually under a lot of attacks, but it seemed convincing at the end. What happened is that they found that he injected ink to the toads to make them become black to have this nepital pest. So he faked the results, and he couldn't stand up with the accusations and kill themselves. Wow. In this book by Kessler, it suggests maybe it was the assistant who did it.

Who killed him?

No, no. Who injected it to sort of save him from. Because the samples lost the coloring or something like that. So it might be. Who knows what happened?

Well, in science, whenever there's a fraud accusation or controversy, it's not uncommon to see a passing of responsibility. There are recent cases, there are ongoing cases now where it's a question of who did what, et cetera. Actually, I have two questions before the second story. I'm struck by the idea that he was traveling and talking. I'm guessing this was before PowerPoint and Keynote, but also before transparencies, which actually were still in place when I was a graduate student. For those of you who don't know, transparencies are basically transparent pieces of plastic paper that you put onto a projector, and then you can write on them and do demonstrations, but can show photographs and things like that, or. So how was he giving these talks, and would he travel with the toads?

So he traveled with the samples.

I see.

And I'm basing this on this Kessler book, which is, on its own, very controversial. It's more of a beautiful story than perhaps the truth. And according to the story there, he had to stand one side of the lecture hall with his hands behind the back while others would examine the samples and pass them around and so on.

But he cheated. Someone cheated.

He probably did. At least that's what most people think. But this wasn't replicated. I mean, also, I don't think anyone tried to replicate it.

Interesting. This is just a point about replication and actually another tragic example. Not. But a few years ago, Sakai, who was, as far as we knew, was doing very accomplished work on the growth of retinas, literally growing eyes in a dish. I think everyone believes that result. But then there were some accusations about another result that turned out to be fraudulent, and Sakai killed himself. This was a recent. This was only about maybe five, 10 years ago. So it still happens.

Yeah, it happens. I think it's rare, but it does happen, especially in this very high profile situation.

I would argue. I'd love to know what your number is, but I would argue that 99% of scientists are seeking truth and are well meaning, honest people.

I totally agree. And I think that even when people are wrong, it's mostly not because they're evil and trying to act deflect. Maybe they really want to believe the results or there are all kinds of way to be wrong and even to bend truth without just blatant fraud. But this is, according to the story, an example of very bad fraud, which I agree is rare because most scientists, as you said, but this is also my opinion, are just trying to discover truth and do the best they can.

Well, why else would you go into it? Because it's certainly not a profession to go into if you want to get.

Rich, not the money.

And it's probably not even a profession to go into if you want to get famous. If you want to be famous, you should go to Hollywood or become a serial killer because they'll make specials about please don't, but please don't do either. No, Hollywood, I suppose for some is fine, but in any case. Okay, so camera around 1907, 1906.

This is slightly before the whole controversy broke out after the first World War.

Okay, yeah, great. So camera is gone. His toads with their either ink or whatever nupetal pads, they have to go back to mating on land.

Yeah.

Okay.

I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Athletic Greens. Athletic greens, now called AG1, is a vitamin, mineral probiotic drink that covers all of your foundational nutritional needs. I've been taking athletic greens since 2012, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast. The reason I started taking Athletic Greens and the reason I still take Athletic Greens once or usually twice a day, is that it gets me the probiotics that I need for gut health. Our gut is very important. It's populated by gut microbiota that communicate with the brain, the immune system, and basically all the biological systems of our body to strongly impact our immediate and long term health. And those probiotics and athletic greens are optimal and vital for microbiotic health. In addition, Athletic Greens contains a number of adaptogens, vitamins and minerals that make sure that all of my foundational nutritional needs are met. And it tastes great. If you'd like to try Athletic Greens, you can go to athleticgreens.com huberman and they'll give you five free travel packs that make it really easy to mix up athletic greens while you're on the road, in the car, on the plane, et cetera. And they'll give you a year's supply of vitamin D3K2. Again, that's athleticgreens.com Huberman to get the five free travel packs and the year's supply of vitamin D3K2.

So this is. Forget about that. We also had the Lysenko episode. That's a very big thing. And then in the US there was, in the 70s and 80s, a researcher named McConnell who did very different experiments. And he was also a character he worked on. So he was the joker type of thing. And he published many of his results in a journal that he published that was called Worms Breeders Gazette and had many cartoons.

And so he started his own journal. Yes, that's one way to publish a lot.

But he also published in very respected journals in parallel. But he was a psychologist, American psychologist. And he worked on worm, which is a flat worm, which is called planaria, which is very interesting. This is different than what we'll discuss today. Different type of worm. You know, worms are very common. So four out of five animals on this planet is a worm. Really? Yes, numerically, if you just count the individual. So we are the exception. But I'll talk about a very different worm later. This is a flatworm. This is called planaria. And it is remarkable in many ways. It was also a model that many people worked on, including the fathers of genetics, people who started genetics like Morgan. They worked on it in the beginning. But it's very, very hard to study genetics in this worm because unlike us, unlike what we explained before about how we all develop from sperm and an egg, these worms, most of the time reproduce just by fission. They tear themselves apart. So they have a head and a tail. And the part of the head will just tear itself apart from the tail. Grow a new. The head will grow a new tail, the tail will grow a new head. You can even cut them to 200 pieces. Each piece will grow into a new worm. And they have centralized brains with lobes and everything. And even these degenerate eyes. He studied these worms and he said that he can teach them certain things, associations, by pairing all. I don't remember exactly what he did. I think it was either lights or electricity.

Shock them.

Shock them with other things. And he could train them to learn and remember particular things.

Like they might get shocked on one side of the tank.

Exactly.

And then avoid that side of the tank.

Yes.

And then I guess the question is whether or not they're ripped apart cells. And their subsequent generations will know to avoid that side of the tank without having ever been exposed to the shock.

Right. So without ever being exposed to shock or whether the new generation, the new head will be able to learn faster. That's another. The subtlety that might happen. Okay, and this is what he said happens. He said he can teach them certain things. Remove, cut off their heads and new heads with all the brain will grow and that it will contain the memory. This was the start of the controversy, not the end of it, only the beginning. Then he said something even much wilder, which is he can train them to learn certain things and then just chop them up, put them in a blender and feed them to other worms because they are cannibalistic, they eat each other. And that the memory will transfer through feeling.

This sounds such a dramatic field.

And by the way, this opened the field. So people did experiments that not only in planaria, but in gold fish and certain rodents and did these memory BRAIN transfer essays Implanting BRAIN and this is back when they had an idea that some memories could be moleculars, could have a molecular form, which is very appealing. It's almost like scientific science fiction. You can have a memory in a tube. Unlike the way we think about memory normally, which is something that is distributed in neuronal circuits and encoded in the strength of particular synapses and so on. But the idea that you can take a memory and reduce it into a molecule and transfer it around is very, very interesting. So this is why it attracted so many people. This ended up in a catastrophe. So there was an NIH investigation. No one can replicate anything. It was a big mess. Although there were always scientists who said, yes, we can replicate this and this. So they were in the background. McConnell stuff was different. Again, people thought that they couldn't, that there are problems replicating. But it wasn't necessarily. But some people replicate. But it wasn't necessarily about replicating the whole thing. But the question was, did the memory that transfer is specific or is it an overall sensitization that transmits and so on. Right.

Like you could imagine that what gets transmitted is a hypersensitivity to electricity as opposed to the specific location that the electricity was introduced.

Or even more than that, even just, you know, a hypersensitivity in general, you're more vigilant and you'll learn anything faster. That's also a possibility. But his problem wasn't the accusation. It was much worse that he was targeted by the Unabomber. These terrorists who sent letters with bombs to many scientists for 15 years. And his assistant again, he's the assistant, I think, exploded. And this is how his line of research ended.

Just.