This chapter explores the transformative power of learning on the brain, particularly focusing on musical engagement. Research demonstrates that music training influences both brain function and anatomy. Studies reveal pianists exhibiting enhanced brain responses to piano tones, musicians outperforming non-musicians in perceiving subtle pitch variations, and even short-term music lessons improving children’s reading skills. The chapter also highlights the impact of practice on brain structure. Professional musicians, for instance, show anatomical differences in auditory and motor cortices, with more pronounced changes linked to early musical training. These changes, primarily attributed to the formation of new neural connections, underscore the brain’s remarkable plasticity. The author proposes that exceptional skills arise from a combination of genetics, environment, and epigenetic changes. He emphasizes the importance of adopting a mindset of unconditional self-acceptance, as negative self-judgment can hinder the therapeutic benefits of music.

The epigenome is a set of chemical modifications that affect how genes are expressed. These modifications can be influenced by environmental and lifestyle factors, such as diet, exercise, sleep, and stress, throughout the lifespan. One of the common pathways that mediates the effects of epigenetics on health is chronic inflammation, which is involved in many diseases and can be reduced by adopting healthy lifestyle habits. The human microbiome is also relevant in understanding the physiological mechanisms by which lifestyle, in particular nutrition, affects health. The microbiome is the collection of microorganisms that live in and on the human body. The microbiome has a key role in modulating the immune system, metabolism, and brain health. The most diverse and influential part of the microbiome is the gut microbiome, which consists of trillions of bacteria, viruses, fungi, and other microbes that reside in the gastrointestinal tract. A healthy and balanced gut microbiome is associated with many benefits for physical and mental health, while an imbalance or dysbiosis can lead to many chronic conditions. The gut microbiome communicates with the brain through the gut–brain axis, which is a complex network of nerves, hormones, and neurotransmitters that influences mood, cognition, and behaviour.

Obesity is a worsening global epidemic that is detrimentally affecting women’s reproductive health. Being obese not only decreases fertility, but also increases miscarriage rates and other pregnancy complications. Perhaps even more significant is the increasing evidence demonstrating associations between maternal obesity and long-term risks of obesity and metabolic disturbances in the offspring.

The mechanisms mediating the effects of obesity on early pregnancy are likely multifactorial, involving oocyte quality, embryo competence, endometrial receptivity, and fetal development. Early pregnancy is a critical time that strongly influences the fate of the pregnancy as well as the health of the next generation.

Richard Tremblay started his professional career as a clinician with juvenile delinquents and mentally ill offenders. He spent the rest of his career doing longitudinal and experimental studies to identify effective preventive interventions during the preschool and elementary school years. Results from these studies showed that early interventions with at risk children and their parents had very long-term impacts. Within these longitudinal studies, he also studied genetic and epigenetic effects on the development of violent behavior.

Over the past half-century attachment theory has emerged as a driving force for research and practice across much of the developmental psychology community. Some of the most compelling empirical support for the biological basis of attachment theory has come from research with monkeys. This chapter highlights some contributions that my colleagues and I have made in generating this evidence by broadening the range of activities associated with attachment throughout development, exploring the relationship between behavioral patterns and a host of biological processes including some genetic factors, and characterizing the consequences of different expressions of attachment for the external social world that is progressively engaged throughout development. This body of nonhuman primate research has featured several important turning points, largely the product of certain unique combinations of colleagues and circumstances that served to generate major inflection points in shaping the direction and scope of the research described here.

This chapter investigates possible future directions of the DOHaD framework. Specifically, it discusses options to translate the framework into the Anthropocene. In a first step, I outline how recent research on epigenetics, the human microbiome, and planetary boundaries challenges notions of origin and development embedded in DOHaD research. I then outline three distinct modes of interdisciplinary collaboration: subordination–service, integration–synthesis, and agonistic–antagonistic. I discuss how each of these modes offers the possibility to conduct research across the nature–culture divide and address human bodies and environments as anthropogenic due to their complex natural, social, and political histories. I conclude that the DOHaD framework needs to embrace the idea of anthropogenic biology to address the challenges of the Anthropocene and take responsibility for the knowledge that it produces in an attempt to shape a politics of habitability for our planet.

In this introduction to the Handbook of DOHaD and Society, we provide an overview of the biosocial research field of the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD). We first trace the evolution of this interdisciplinary field over the past two decades, charting the historical conditions that have brought DOHaD to a critical moment when the field is at a threshold of interdisciplinary innovation across both life and social sciences. We then discuss the biosocial perspective that DOHaD offers as its central premise and promise, allowing for questions of socio-environmental justice, discrimination, and equity to be centred in science and biomedicine. We explore the challenges that complicate this biosocial agenda in practice and attend to questions of research translation, interdisciplinary collaboration, and the socio-cultural dimensions of DOHaD-based health interventions. We end by highlighting the transformational potential of the DOHaD research paradigm and how this handbook offers a toolkit for robust interdisciplinary research in this field.

Embodiment is a key concept in the social sciences and has been particularly useful in discussions of the body, health, and disease. Embodiment allows us to connect the subjective experiences of the body, as well as its lived materiality, to broader social contexts. The concept also helps researchers make sense of the ways in which the body is inscribed with history, politics, and culture. This chapter explores the concept of embodiment in the social sciences and its potential use in DOHaD. We argue that it is important to integrate concepts/tools from the social sciences, in this case embodiment, as biosocial collaborations compel cross-disciplinary legibility and a shared vocabulary. Moreover, this integration of concepts and tools would allow DOHaD as a field to deepen awareness and understanding of the kind of influence environmental experiences can have on the development of health and disease over the lifecourse. We suggest that this deeper awareness and understanding achieved through employing the embodiment concept can make DOHaD research and interventions more socially just and socially sensitive.

The term ‘intergenerational trauma’ describes how trauma experienced in one generation can reverberate in the lives of descendants. The concept has been variously defined in relation to other disciplines and has overlaps with cognate concepts, including historical trauma, transgenerational trauma, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In this chapter, we provide a conceptual overview of intergenerational trauma in the interdisciplinary field of DOHaD research. Intergenerational trauma is of interest to many disciplines and frameworks in part because it lends itself to ’biosocial’ understandings of violence and discriminatory social contexts as physiologically embodied. Yet, intergenerational trauma also presents challenges for scientific study due to the difficulties inherent in stabilising it as a scientific object. Given the growing public interest in intergenerational trauma and its routinised clinical uptake for the care of marginalised communities, this chapter also considers a range of important questions related to policy translation, biopolitics, and social justice.

DOHaD research on preconception, prenatal, and early-life periods of human development can provide a critical resource for legal thinkers interrogating the lines of responsibility for environmental harms (both physical and psychosocial) that affect a child’s growth and development. DOHaD scholars who engage with epigenetic research offer an evidentiary narrative that traces the causal origin of early-life health harms to events that have occurred during pregnancy and prior to conception. Scientific research is increasingly providing evidence that those who suffer disadvantage throughout their lifecourse (in conditions of systemic oppression such as from racism, sexism, or poverty) may be disproportionately subject to molecular changes, creating harmed subgroups that are then intergenerationally reproduced as socially disadvantaged communities. Drawing examples from Australia, the United States, and Canada, this chapter asks what legal obligations, if any, should or can be imposed on contemporary society to ensure not just the future ’health’ of existing children (as they grow into adults) but also the generations of people yet to be born. It is argued that traditional common law legal responses that place responsibility on the individual rather than the community do not ensure intergenerational justice.

This chapter argues against the narrative that posits a pre-twentieth century past, where the mother and fetus were one, in contrast with the present, where the fetus is visible and autonomous. I complicate this narrative by showing that the maternal–fetal relationship was redrawn and reinterpreted multiple times in the twentieth century. The ‘fetal parasite’ era was informed by the hereditarianism of the early 1900s. The notion of a developing organism sensitive to external influences was replaced by a remarkably sheltered fetus. In contrast, concerns around the physical and psychological trauma following the Second World War supported the notion of ‘critical’ periods, responsive to external influences mediated by the mother. Yet soon thereafter, the language and imagery of an autonomous, self-sufficient fetus became prevalent amidst political battles over abortion. The notion of the autonomous fetus is linked to evolutionary biology’s 1970s concepts of the ‘selfish gene’ – with the ‘selfish’ fetus pitted against the mother in the struggle over scarce resources. By the 1990s, the rise of DOHaD and epigenetics signalled a return of the maternally mediated environment to the science of human development. While some interpreted this as a return to the pre-modern model, there is a significant difference. Here maternal experiences and surroundings have to be rendered accessible to an experimental, molecular approach and to show evidence of a quantifiable change in observed parameters.