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Inheriting Trauma · New Thinking for a New World

0:02
Speaker 1: Welcome to New Thinking for a New World, a Tilburg Foundation podcast.
0:06
Speaker 1: I am Alan Stoga, your host.
0:09
Speaker 1: Each week I bring you conversations with people who think differently about the great issues that are shaping our world.
0:15
Speaker 1: Geopolitics, disruptive tech, mass migration, the changing climate, culture wars, all of it is grist for our mill.
0:24
Speaker 1: I hope you enjoy listening.
0:26
Speaker 1: I also hope you will let me know what you think.
0:28
Speaker 1: and that you join the conversation at tellbergfoundation.org.
0:33
Speaker 1: And now for today's episode of New Thinking for a New World.
0:40
Speaker 1: The number of active conflicts today is the highest since World War II.
0:45
Speaker 1: Global violence has clearly entered a new, more violent and fragmented era.
0:50
Speaker 1: We can and should debate why, but today we're going to focus on so what in the sense of consequences?
0:58
Speaker 1: Not for the warriors, but for the innocents caught up in the spreading conflicts.
1:04
Speaker 1: Specifically, what are the lingering consequences of the trauma of war?
1:09
Speaker 1: What happens not just to the immediate victims, but to their daughters, sons, or grandchildren?
1:16
Speaker 1: Can the impacts of violence be transmitted across generations?
1:20
Speaker 1: If so, can anything be done about it?
1:23
Speaker 1: A group of scientists believe the answer, at least to the transmission question, is yes.
1:29
Speaker 1: They published a profoundly important scientific paper last year and have continued to develop their ideas and their work.
1:37
Speaker 1: Among the authors was Rana Dejani, a molecular biologist and longtime participant in the Tilburg Network.
1:44
Speaker 1: Welcome, Rana, to new thinking for a new world.
1:48
Speaker 0: Thank you for having me and shedding light on this very important issue.
1:54
Speaker 1: Let's start with the science.
1:56
Speaker 1: How does extreme trauma change gene expression within individuals?
2:01
Speaker 1: And could that produce, or how could that produce, I guess, heritable changes?
2:07
Speaker 0: All right.
2:07
Speaker 0: So, you know, as human beings, we exist in the world as a result of two things.
2:13
Speaker 0: One, what we inherit from our parents, and two, the environment we interact with throughout our lifetime.
2:20
Speaker 0: And the environment we interact with throughout our lifetime not only impacts our biology and physiology in terms of hormones and immune markers, but also turns on or off genes.
2:32
Speaker 0: And this turning on or off genes is what we call epigenetics, or change in gene expression.
2:40
Speaker 0: Now, the question is that we're interested in is, What are those genes that are turned on and off as a result of exposure to particular environmental experiences, such as violence and trauma and displacement?
2:55
Speaker 0: There have been a number of studies that actually look at that.
2:58
Speaker 0: And some sections of the genome have been identified and correlated with violence and trauma.
3:05
Speaker 0: We had identified twenty-one new genomic sites in the DNA of women.
3:12
Speaker 0: who have been exposed directly to violence and trauma.
3:16
Speaker 1: You're not talking about changes in the DNA.
3:20
Speaker 1: You're talking about changes in how genes are turned on or off.
3:26
Speaker 0: Yes, so your DNA does not change.
3:28
Speaker 1: There's a very much an unscientist asking the question.
3:30
Speaker 1: No,
3:30
Speaker 0: no, that's a good point because people sometimes misinterpret that and that's a profound mistake.
3:36
Speaker 0: So thank you for actually clarifying this.
3:38
Speaker 0: Your DNA does not change.
3:41
Speaker 0: because of environmental exposures, except for like really extreme violent exposures, like if you're in a nuclear bomb, right?
3:49
Speaker 0: Something like that.
3:50
Speaker 0: Or exposed to high, high amounts of radiation.
3:53
Speaker 0: That will change your DNA.
3:55
Speaker 0: But we're not talking about that.
3:56
Speaker 0: We're talking about your everyday experiences from what you eat, your lifestyle.
4:01
Speaker 0: Actually, maybe as you listen to me, some of your genes are being turned on and off.
4:06
Speaker 0: So be careful.
4:07
Speaker 0: This is a warning.
4:09
Speaker 0: You can stop listening if you want.
4:12
Speaker 0: But collectively, it is that collective experiences that we are exposed to.
4:16
Speaker 0: since we are a zygote one cell in the uterus of our mothers, until we die, our epigenome is constantly changing because of what we are being exposed to.
4:29
Speaker 0: And this is fascinating because this helps us get away from being deterministic because of what you've inherited from your parents.
4:37
Speaker 0: There is a leeway.
4:38
Speaker 0: There is a window where your gene expression can be regulated.
4:44
Speaker 0: So just to summarize, your DNA does not change.
4:47
Speaker 0: However, what can happen is that the genes that make up your DNA can be turned on or off as a result of experiences that you are exposed to.
4:57
Speaker 1: And one of those experiences, and this is the source to the core of your work, is extreme trauma, particularly conflict related.
5:05
Speaker 0: Yeah, so I was interested in particular to answer what is the impact of extreme violence and trauma on our DNA, because first of all, the whole epigenetic research is a very new field, relatively speaking.
5:21
Speaker 0: And therefore, we really don't know enough or much about what genes are turned on enough because of our everyday experiences.
5:28
Speaker 0: And it's more difficult to kind of figure out what gene is being turned on enough say when you eat spaghetti or when you watch a movie or read a book.
5:36
Speaker 0: But being exposed to violent trauma definitely will have an impact.
5:41
Speaker 0: So it's easier to see, so to speak.
5:43
Speaker 0: And it's more important and relevant to human beings and future generations.
5:49
Speaker 0: Now, when we talk about epigenetics, we always propose three questions.
5:53
Speaker 0: One is, what genes are turned on and off as a result of exposure to trauma in our case?
5:59
Speaker 0: The second question is, Are those changes transferred to future generations?
6:04
Speaker 0: And the third one is, can you reverse those changes through environmental exposure and experiences since it's all about epigenetics?
6:13
Speaker 0: And the first question, like I said, is what is being changed and turned on and off?
6:18
Speaker 0: People are working on those in different, let's say, dimensions and different experiences.
6:25
Speaker 0: But the question is whether those changes can be transferred across generations.
6:30
Speaker 0: that question has not been answered.
6:32
Speaker 0: And the reason is because ethically, you cannot design such an experiment.
6:35
Speaker 0: You can't just bring a bunch of people and expose them to violence and trauma and wait for three generations and then get another group of people from the same region, the same ethnicity and say, we're not going to expose you to trauma and we're going to wait for three generations and then compare.
6:51
Speaker 1: So there's no control.
6:52
Speaker 1: It's not possible to have a control population.
6:54
Speaker 0: Exactly.
6:55
Speaker 0: And that's why most of the studies that refer to intergenerational inheritance of trauma are not controlled experiments.
7:03
Speaker 0: And therefore, those are correlations.
7:05
Speaker 0: And as a scientist, you can explain it in multiple different ways and not necessarily tie it to an epigenetic signature that is transferred.
7:13
Speaker 0: Now, because of the intricate knowledge of the history and culture and community of the region I come from, I'm my father's Palestinian from Jerusalem.
7:25
Speaker 0: He was evicted violently by Zionist forces in nineteen forty-eight when he was five and went to Lebanon.
7:30
Speaker 0: My mother is Syrian from the city of Hama and Halab Aleppo where the Assad regime had conducted a massacre and more than twenty thousand people were killed and many more imprisoned and tortured.
7:46
Speaker 0: And many of course ran away and came to Jordan where I was living and actually came and lived in my home.
7:53
Speaker 0: when I was a teenager.
7:54
Speaker 0: And so I was, all throughout my lifetime, I've been intricately involved and experienced firsthand the exposure of human beings to violence and trauma and war and displacement.
8:08
Speaker 0: And as a scientist who studies genetics of ethnic populations, this kind of all came together in two thousand and eleven when the Assad regime cracked down on the civil uprising.
8:21
Speaker 0: that happened, and almost two million Syrians came to Jordan.
8:25
Speaker 0: And that's when I thought, wait a minute, this is a very important question in epigenetics, and I can answer it because I know all those families and all those women who were pregnant in two, and I can actually trace them and find the different control groups.
8:43
Speaker 0: And so I designed this very intricate design.
8:45
Speaker 0: And
8:47
Speaker 1: in two is Hama.
8:49
Speaker 0: Yes, Hama is a city.
8:51
Speaker 0: in Syria and that's what was essentially
8:54
Speaker 1: destroyed by
8:56
Speaker 0: the father half as an asset.
9:00
Speaker 0: And of course there was no internet.
9:01
Speaker 0: then there was no social media so nobody knew what was going on.
9:05
Speaker 0: As if it matters everybody knows what's going on in Gaza.
9:08
Speaker 0: it's still the same so a lesson learned there.
9:12
Speaker 0: So I thought I can answer this question and this is the beauty of being a scientist from the community.
9:18
Speaker 0: because then you can really do better science because you know what's happening and you can gain the trust.
9:23
Speaker 0: So I designed this intricate research design.
9:28
Speaker 0: I had one group of a cohort where the women were pregnant in two and exposed to the violence of the Assad regime.
9:39
Speaker 0: And then I had their daughters and their granddaughters who were not exposed because after the massacre, they had left the city of Hama.
9:48
Speaker 0: The second group were women from the same city, pregnant in nineteen eighty two, but not present during the massacre.
9:58
Speaker 0: And their daughters, later on in two thousand eleven, were pregnant and exposed to the two thousand eleven crackdown from the Assad regime.
10:07
Speaker 0: And then their grandchildren.
10:09
Speaker 0: The third group was from the same city.
10:12
Speaker 0: from the same ethnicity, but had left the city of Hamaway before in the nineteen thirties and moved to Jordan where they had settled.
10:21
Speaker 0: And I had those women and their daughters and their granddaughters.
10:26
Speaker 0: So we had the perfect design to answer the question whether exposure to violence and trauma can be transferred across three generations in human beings.
10:37
Speaker 0: You know, it's been proven already in mice and worms.
10:40
Speaker 0: but never in human beings.
10:43
Speaker 0: And of course, it took us ten years to find enough families, at least an average of twenty per group, to fit the stringent criteria that we had set up so that they could be used in the experimental design.
10:56
Speaker 0: And these families, we found them in Jordan, in the Emirates, in Turkey, in Lebanon, in Saudi Arabia, even as far as the US.
11:06
Speaker 0: We became famous looking for these families.
11:10
Speaker 0: After we collected the DNA, which is actually just a simple cheek swab, we actually collaborated with two other universities.
11:19
Speaker 0: So with Yale University, because we needed an anthropologist to assess the physical exposure to trauma in the sense in their mental health.
11:28
Speaker 0: And the second one was University of Florida to do the epigenetic analysis itself, because we don't have that kind of resources or labs to do the epigenetic analysis in Jordan.
11:41
Speaker 0: So it was a teamwork across borders, but led by somebody who is local for Syrian and who knows the science.
11:51
Speaker 0: And this is important because the people had to open up and share with us their stories and to give us DNA samples.
11:58
Speaker 0: And this was pretty taboo.
12:01
Speaker 0: But because it was all about Rana is Syrian, and we're going to understand what happened to us so that we have some control and some agency over our lives.
12:10
Speaker 0: But it was done also in secret because they were scared.
12:13
Speaker 0: They were scared if anybody knew about what was happening or the Assad regime heard, even if they were outside of Syria.
12:19
Speaker 0: It's kind of this fear of being caught because of the extreme surveillance of the Assad regime.
12:28
Speaker 0: But because of the trust they were able to give us all those samples, And it so coincided that we published our results on the forty second anniversary of the massacre in February, twenty twenty five.
12:41
Speaker 0: And fortunately, the Assad regime had fell in December or in the year before.
12:47
Speaker 0: So they could suddenly not just celebrate, but actually talk freely and openly about the results and what it means to them.
12:54
Speaker 1: So tell me about the results.
12:56
Speaker 1: What did the tests reveal and what did you conclude from them?
13:00
Speaker 0: So we had three main results.
13:02
Speaker 0: The first one is that those who were exposed directly to trauma while pregnant, they had twenty-one sites on their genome that had an epigenetic signature.
13:13
Speaker 0: These were new sites, but it wasn't the first time people had shown that direct exposure will impact your epigenetic.
13:20
Speaker 1: At technical point, would you say twenty-one sites out of how many?
13:24
Speaker 1: Give us a definition.
13:26
Speaker 0: We looked at eight hundred and fifty thousand sites on the epigenome.
13:32
Speaker 0: These are parts of the DNA that have an additional methylation group, a chemical modification, that turns on or off the gene.
13:41
Speaker 0: So we discovered in the women who were directly exposed to trauma, whether in nineteen eighty two or two thousand eleven or as children, that there was those twenty one sites on the epigenome.
13:54
Speaker 0: had a signature as a result of the trauma exposure.
13:58
Speaker 0: Now, these were new, twenty-one sites, but it's not a new concept that there was an impact of war and trauma on the epigenome with direct exposure.
14:08
Speaker 0: But the big discovery was that the grandchildren of the women who were pregnant in nineteen eighty two exposed to violence and trauma had inherited an epigenetic signature from their grandparents.
14:23
Speaker 0: although they themselves were not exposed to trauma, neither were their mothers.
14:27
Speaker 0: And this epigenetic signature was present on fourteen different sites of the epigenome.
14:34
Speaker 0: And these are sites that nobody had ever identified before.
14:37
Speaker 0: Now, in the grandchildren of the women who were pregnant and exposed to trauma of violence in nineteen eighty-two, they had fourteen sites that are present in everybody, but they were changed as a result of the exposure of the grandparents in the grandchildren.
14:57
Speaker 0: So you have them and I have them, but those are not changed.
15:00
Speaker 0: They don't have this epigenetic signature of trauma.
15:03
Speaker 0: These grandchildren had an epigenetic signature of trauma, of course, compared to controls within the intricate design that we had to create.
15:13
Speaker 0: So these are real in a statistically significant, of course, sense as scientists.
15:21
Speaker 0: Now, So this was the first time ever that we really show an epigenetic signature that is transferred across three generations compared to controls.
15:32
Speaker 0: But the interesting thing also is that those fourteen sites, when we started to look, okay, what do these sites represent?
15:40
Speaker 0: Where can we find them?
15:41
Speaker 0: We looked at every known today biological pathway to look for these sites, and they were not anywhere, not in any cardiovascular.
15:51
Speaker 0: you know, biological pathways, diabetes biological pathways, mental health biological pathways, immune pathways, cancer pathways, they did not show up at all.
16:02
Speaker 0: So what does that mean?
16:04
Speaker 0: Well, to me, what we can hypothesize is that if, as it is always said, and the research had shown correlation, not causation, that when your grandparents are exposed to trauma, you inherit more propensity to cardiovascular disease or diabetes or mental health or whatever.
16:26
Speaker 0: Well, if that's true, how come these fourteen sites that we discovered are not part of any one of those biological pathways?
16:34
Speaker 0: Right?
16:34
Speaker 0: So to me, maybe we're looking, we're shining the light in the wrong place of the room.
16:39
Speaker 0: You know, maybe it isn't, you know, a burden and victimhood that we are inheriting from our grandparents.
16:46
Speaker 0: Maybe there's another part of the story.
16:49
Speaker 0: There's something else to the story and that's when I started thinking from an evolutionary biology perspective.
16:54
Speaker 0: You know that we as Homo sapiens have been around for at least two hundred thousand years And we have had our fair share our fights and violence and trauma throughout these two hundred thousand years.
17:07
Speaker 1: We've never had a period without it
17:09
Speaker 0: and so if therefore anybody who's been exposed to war and trauma is passing down an epigenetic signature, which we have proven.
17:18
Speaker 0: These are passed down, right?
17:20
Speaker 0: At least in these fourteen sites we've identified.
17:24
Speaker 0: How come we're all not victims and we're all having problems?
17:28
Speaker 0: I mean, the normal average human being is not a victim.
17:36
Speaker 0: What's the word?
17:36
Speaker 0: Sorry, I'm losing.
17:38
Speaker 0: The majority of the people are not all sick and diabetic and cardiovascular and all that.
17:45
Speaker 0: There's a bell curve for that.
17:47
Speaker 0: Therefore, this framing that we inherit from our grandparents who have been exposed to violence and trauma, propensity for diseases, and therefore being victims and being vulnerable is not entirely correct.
18:04
Speaker 0: And actually, it makes sense the other way around that what our grandparents pass on to us is not victimhood and vulnerability.
18:12
Speaker 0: Rather, can we say it is agency and adaptability?
18:15
Speaker 0: And no, why did I say agency and adaptability?
18:18
Speaker 0: Because not just looking at evolutionary history, because that makes more sense since we're all alive today, but also in biology, human beings are part of nature, part of the human family.
18:33
Speaker 0: Humans are part of the tree of life.
18:36
Speaker 0: And so we can look at other organisms to learn from them and to understand their mechanisms, which relate to our mechanisms.
18:44
Speaker 0: And at the time our research was happening, we actually, a paper was published about octopus.
18:50
Speaker 0: Interesting.
18:51
Speaker 0: Octopus are very, very similar to humans.
18:55
Speaker 0: Well, they're very smart.
18:56
Speaker 0: That's number one.
18:57
Speaker 0: But more so, they're very social creatures.
19:00
Speaker 1: I challenge that people are very smart, but we'll come back to that some other time.
19:05
Speaker 0: Well, I agree with you because people think that being smart is why we survived.
19:09
Speaker 0: And I tell them, no, it's not because we're smart, we survived.
19:12
Speaker 0: There are smarter organisms.
19:14
Speaker 0: We survive because we are social creatures.
19:17
Speaker 0: And that's what also is similar between us and octopus, that they are social creatures.
19:22
Speaker 0: And lastly, because they live in very complex environments such as us, and they cope and adapt.
19:27
Speaker 0: And guess what?
19:28
Speaker 0: They have highly, highly sophisticated regulation of their gene expression at a different level than humans.
19:38
Speaker 0: But the concept is the same.
19:39
Speaker 0: They highly regulate their gene expression.
19:41
Speaker 0: We highly regulate our gene expression.
19:43
Speaker 0: And so that got me thinking that it's not about victimhood and vulnerability.
19:46
Speaker 0: It's about agency and adaptability.
19:49
Speaker 0: So what we pass on to our grandchildren is that now our grandchildren have the capacity to adapt to future environments that are unpredictable.
19:57
Speaker 0: And that's what our grandparents gave us.
19:59
Speaker 0: And I called it my grandmother's wisdom.
20:03
Speaker 0: And to me, it opened a whole new way of looking at life, at looking at people have been exposed to trauma and violence.
20:14
Speaker 0: Maybe not within the lifetime of people.
20:16
Speaker 0: That has already recorded and shown.
20:19
Speaker 0: you will have negative impacts, but it's what you pass on to your grandchildren that opens up to a more, I don't want to say the word positive because then I insinuate there's a negative.
20:30
Speaker 0: And in nature, this putting binaries is unnatural.
20:36
Speaker 0: People in the past in modernity, proposed, you know, categorizing and binary schematics.
20:42
Speaker 0: But today we know from nature that that doesn't hold true, that in nature everything is a spectrum, right?
20:48
Speaker 0: So it's not that trauma is negative, neither is it positive, meaning we're not victims, neither are we all heroes because both are a burden.
20:57
Speaker 0: It's we are a spectrum in how we, because of our diversity and how we adapt to future unpredictable environments.
21:05
Speaker 0: And so that to me is not just the results and the most important result we have, but what does it mean?
21:12
Speaker 0: and what could it mean?
21:13
Speaker 0: And this, you know, any good research answers one question, but opens up a hundred more.
21:17
Speaker 0: And I think by proposing this framework, we're opening it up to scientists and researchers to try to understand.
21:24
Speaker 0: what do these protein sites do?
21:27
Speaker 0: Because now we have to understand their function.
21:29
Speaker 0: Can we look at them in other situations, in other cases?
21:34
Speaker 0: Can we repeat these studies in other populations?
21:37
Speaker 0: And can we identify the functions of these genes in cells?
21:41
Speaker 0: And then can this framing that I'm suggesting hold up in the future?
21:48
Speaker 0: What do war lessons from Gaza, rethinking education, peace in Ukraine, and visionary leadership have in common?
21:56
Speaker 0: They are all themes from recent episodes of this podcast.
22:00
Speaker 0: Check out more episodes on tellbergfoundation.org or on a platform of your choice.
22:09
Speaker 1: I want to get to the so what in a moment, but I want to stay for just a nanosecond with violence, because the through line of civilization said to say, among other through lines, is violence.
22:27
Speaker 1: We've talked so far about one of the consequences of that is impact on victims, on people who have been exposed to the trauma of war, although particularly women.
22:39
Speaker 1: their daughters and their daughters' daughters.
22:43
Speaker 1: But that through line is violence.
22:47
Speaker 1: And the question, I guess it's first the epigenic question, presumably there are genes turned on or off that make humans violent.
23:02
Speaker 1: And again, this is non-scientists asking, what do we know about from a molecular biologist point of view?
23:10
Speaker 1: about violence and why?
23:14
Speaker 1: ever since ever, every society on the planet has been violent, has fought wars, has constantly ebbed and flowed in that sense.
23:28
Speaker 0: So again, I'm not a historian, right?
23:32
Speaker 0: I'm
23:32
Speaker 1: not asking a history question, I'm asking the... I know you're not.
23:36
Speaker 1: I'm more of a historian than you are.
23:38
Speaker 1: You know what you know, and you know it extremely well.
23:41
Speaker 1: What do we know about the human that has, or do we not know, as you suggest?
23:47
Speaker 0: Your question is, is there a genetic signature for violence?
23:52
Speaker 1: I think that's my question.
23:53
Speaker 0: So we don't know the answer to that, right?
23:56
Speaker 0: And because, again, how do you define propensity or violent behavior?
24:06
Speaker 0: it is very wide and very deep and very complex.
24:09
Speaker 0: right because you have of course you have the again i'm i'm waiting into waters that i'm not an expert in but i'll just give a general.
24:16
Speaker 0: you have the violent actions of people who are psychopaths and we know that that's very documented.
24:22
Speaker 0: they have mental health disorders that can be explained because of chemical imbalances in their brain.
24:29
Speaker 0: That's different.
24:29
Speaker 0: That's not the violence we're talking about.
24:31
Speaker 0: We're talking more of a widespread violence of competition.
24:35
Speaker 0: We're talking
24:35
Speaker 1: about conflict and war.
24:37
Speaker 0: Yeah, exactly.
24:38
Speaker 0: And that's more of a generic kind of behavior that we're trying to look at.
24:43
Speaker 0: And that hasn't been studied enough, by the way.
24:46
Speaker 0: We don't understand.
24:46
Speaker 0: But I want to challenge you as a historian and me as a scientist that not every not throughout history have we been violent constantly all the time.
24:58
Speaker 0: Again, and this is food for thought, and this is not me.
25:01
Speaker 0: I've been reading a lot of literature about this.
25:04
Speaker 0: There's a book called Humankind.
25:08
Speaker 0: I find the author, but a lot of what we have interpreted from evidence discovered in ancient populations.
25:18
Speaker 0: I'm not talking about the last five hundred or thousand years.
25:20
Speaker 0: I'm talking, you know, we've been around, like I said, two hundred thousand years.
25:23
Speaker 0: I'm looking at the evidence that was discovered.
25:26
Speaker 0: Many of it was interpreted by Western white men with a particular framing of how to interpret the data.
25:32
Speaker 0: And now going back today, many anthropologists are going back to that same evidence and saying, hey, wait a minute, we can interpret this in a different way.
25:40
Speaker 0: And that's where I challenge that who is interpreting what.
25:45
Speaker 0: And as much as we want to say we are neutral, we're not biased, we're all biased.
25:50
Speaker 0: And whether we know it or not, you grow up in a particular environment.
25:56
Speaker 0: Most
25:56
Speaker 1: people in most places would agree with the fact that there is a violent streak in humans.
26:03
Speaker 0: Again, I'm an optimist, Alan.
26:05
Speaker 0: I do not agree with that.
26:07
Speaker 1: Let's go back to your research, because it is important.
26:11
Speaker 1: And the real question is, what is the implication?
26:15
Speaker 1: If there are biological reasons, and that's my word, not your word.
26:19
Speaker 1: that cycles of violence or a victim hood.
26:23
Speaker 1: I guess that's my question.
26:24
Speaker 1: Is it cycles of victim hood or cycles of violence that repeat themselves?
26:31
Speaker 1: Is that what you directionally are saying?
26:35
Speaker 0: No, I'm not.
26:36
Speaker 0: Okay.
26:36
Speaker 0: I need to be very careful what I'm saying.
26:38
Speaker 0: What I'm saying is that when you're exposed to extreme trauma, and this is not the one-time thing or something happening in this century.
26:45
Speaker 0: It's been happening on and off for a long time.
26:49
Speaker 0: What is passed down to the grandchildren is adaptability and agency to cope with this unpredictable environment that happened to their grandparents.
27:00
Speaker 0: This is not victimhood because victimhood means you have no agency, you receive what you receive and you are a victim and you are vulnerable to new things.
27:08
Speaker 0: I think that framing is a colonial trope that only appeared in the framing of science and scientists today and this century.
27:18
Speaker 0: Because, like I said, if we were all victims and vulnerable, how come?
27:21
Speaker 0: we are all here and we're okay?
27:23
Speaker 0: To me, this is a colonial trope.
27:25
Speaker 0: First, the colonizers colonized us, right?
27:27
Speaker 0: And now they've gone and they want to come and save us.
27:31
Speaker 0: This language, this framing only happens to the oppressed, whether it's, you know, the end of colonialism, slavery.
27:40
Speaker 0: Now today, like you said, I'm talking about my part of the world, the Middle East.
27:44
Speaker 0: Everybody wants to come and save us suddenly.
27:46
Speaker 0: Hey, what about, you know, why do we need saving?
27:49
Speaker 0: No, I want to propose a new framing that we all inherit, not victimhood and vulnerability.
27:54
Speaker 0: Therefore, we need saving.
27:56
Speaker 0: We all, as humans, innately inherit adaptability.
28:01
Speaker 0: And that's how we cope with the future.
28:02
Speaker 0: And this is freeing from this colonial tropes, this colonial framing that makes me sit as a refugee waiting for an international NGO to come and save me and tell me what to do.
28:14
Speaker 0: And by the way, and I use the word agency because agency is also a part of why we survived as a species.
28:20
Speaker 0: It's when you wake up and you make a plan and you take care of your kids and you have to find food.
28:24
Speaker 0: This is very good for your mental health.
28:26
Speaker 0: And when that is taken away from you, this is very detrimental to your mental health.
28:30
Speaker 0: And what I'm proposing is that we, those fourteen sites, since we conduct identify them in any known biological path of the way.
28:38
Speaker 0: that is all disease related because we only, you know, humans only study disease.
28:42
Speaker 0: Nobody studies.
28:44
Speaker 0: how we cope.
28:45
Speaker 0: They always look at the half cup empty, not the half cup full.
28:48
Speaker 0: And I'm going to give you what is the implications of this.
28:51
Speaker 0: The implications of.
28:52
Speaker 0: when we study populations, we only put the lens of victimhood.
28:56
Speaker 0: Nobody, for example, what's going on in Gaza and how Gaza are standing up to what's happening.
29:03
Speaker 0: You want to call it resilience.
29:05
Speaker 0: I don't think even resilience as a word captures what's happening.
29:08
Speaker 0: In Arabic, we call it sumud, which means to be steadfast.
29:12
Speaker 0: Nobody studies that and how that comes about.
29:16
Speaker 0: What does that mean?
29:17
Speaker 0: How do we describe it as a behavior?
29:19
Speaker 0: How do you measure it?
29:20
Speaker 0: Does it have a biological component?
29:22
Speaker 0: Does it have an epigenetic signature?
29:24
Speaker 0: Nobody studies it.
29:26
Speaker 0: And when you dig deeper, you find a few research papers here and there, and they tie it to meaning making, which is another reason we survived as a species.
29:36
Speaker 0: Now, meaning making is the sterile way of talking about faith and purpose.
29:40
Speaker 0: And like a very famous anthropologist said, suffering without purpose is what kills you.
29:46
Speaker 0: If you have suffering for a purpose, then you remain sane.
29:51
Speaker 0: And I think this is something that nobody has studied.
29:53
Speaker 0: To date, we don't have good measures for resilience.
29:57
Speaker 0: To date, we don't have biological markers for resilience.
30:01
Speaker 0: We have a plenty for anxiety and stress.
30:04
Speaker 0: So again, to me, this is an opening to a whole new field that will be very beneficial.
30:11
Speaker 0: I don't want to use the word victim.
30:14
Speaker 0: This will be very beneficial to people who have experienced war and trauma, and their children, and their grandchildren, and future generations.
30:23
Speaker 0: Because as I was telling one, one of actually our Talberg awardees, the mentees.
30:31
Speaker 0: Although I'm not her mentor, I had a conversation with her later, and I was telling her about my research.
30:35
Speaker 0: We had a Zoom call, and she said, oh my god, Rana.
30:39
Speaker 0: You opened a whole new world of possibilities for me.
30:43
Speaker 0: I don't need to wait for somebody to save me.
30:46
Speaker 0: I'm not a victim.
30:47
Speaker 0: And she reminded me that we need to unlearn all this victimhood.
30:52
Speaker 0: And by unlearning it, you are giving people back their lives.
30:57
Speaker 0: And it's all about perspectives.
30:59
Speaker 0: It's totally perspectives.
31:00
Speaker 0: It's like when you see the very optical illusion of an old woman, young woman.
31:06
Speaker 0: And if you're conditioned, you see the old woman in one way, or you could be conditioned to see the young woman.
31:11
Speaker 0: So how much our lives and our experiences condition us to see one part of the room and not shed light on the other part of the
31:17
Speaker 1: room?
31:19
Speaker 1: I have a whole bunch more questions, but I have no time.
31:23
Speaker 1: So, Rana, thank you very much.
31:25
Speaker 1: I think it is the conclusion is not where I thought you came out.
31:30
Speaker 1: So the conclusion that We need to better understand resilience.
31:36
Speaker 1: I find it surprising that it's not understood.
31:40
Speaker 1: Again, you're approaching a party as a scientist, which is important.
31:43
Speaker 1: In the world, I live in, it's all about resilience.
31:47
Speaker 1: It's all about starting over every day and solving the problem and rethinking the problem and turning it upside down and backwards.
31:56
Speaker 1: How one does that?
31:59
Speaker 1: What is the scientific basis for that?
32:02
Speaker 1: And can one encourage it or promote it or whatever the right verb is, is a fascinating question.
32:10
Speaker 1: So thanks.
32:11
Speaker 0: Thank you.
32:12
Speaker 0: And hopefully this opened a whole new horizon for future scientists and researchers to help us create better science for humanity.
32:22
Speaker 1: Inshallah.
32:28
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to this episode of New Thinking for New World.
32:32
Speaker 1: I'm Alan Stoga, podcast host, and I look forward to your joining our next conversation.
32:37
Speaker 1: Remember, tell us what you think at tellbergfoundation.org.