Deborah Daley: 00:06
Hello, and welcome to Changemakers, a podcast series brought to you by Nature, where we shine a light on fascinating and extraordinary scientists.
I’m Deborah Daley, global Chair of Springer Nature’s Black Employee Network.
And I’m very proud to present this series where we explore exclusion in science and how some researchers are doing something about it.
In episode two, we meet a Palestinian researcher who works alongside Syrian refugees on the effects and inheritability of the trauma caused by war.
Rana Dajani 00:52
My name is Rana Dajani. I’m a professor of molecular biology at the Hashemite University in Jordan. Currently, I’m a visiting professor at the University of Harvard.
My field of expertise, I study epigenetics of trauma in vulnerable communities around the world, trying to understand what genes are turned on and off through trauma, how can we reverse them, and are they transferred to future generations?
I am Palestinian. My father is from Jerusalem. And I’m Syrian, my mother’s from Aleppo, but I live in Jordan, which is similar to many people who live in this part of the world, where colonization drew these lines, separating us when we’re all really one culture, one history, one language,
Growing up, we read a lot. We didn’t have a TV.
We were always reading books and novels and stories, which are so important to foster critical thinking. You know, having the courage to be a changemaker, learning about other cultures and people, and most importantly, having vocabulary to express yourself.
And I grew up in a Muslim community, family, where the mind was celebrated and that there was no red tape on any question we wanted to ask.
So curiosity was and critical thinking were the hallmarks of our everyday conversations. And I think that sparked in me this curiosity and this drive to explore nature around me, to ask questions and to try to find those answers.
And I dreamed of going to Antarctica or to the moon. I think in the end, I decided to become a pioneer at the molecular level, going micro instead of macro, and understanding what are the, how the biology of our bodies work.
And if I understand the biology, I can then help people and humans, because I can find the solutions to the different diseases that humans develop as a result of things going wrong.
And so I wanted to become a scientist. In Jordan there were no PhD programs, so I finished my masters and became a school teacher for 10 years.
But that dream of being a scientist was always at the back of my mind, and my husband saw an ad in the newspaper for a Fulbright scholarship to do my PhD, and I actually got the scholarship, and that’s when, by that time, we had four kids, so my husband actually resigned from the Air Force, where he was a lieutenant colonel, and we all went together to the US for me to do my PhD.
So it’s really important who are your partner is, and how you juggle and prioritize your priorities. So to me, my family was a priority, as well as my science, and I needed a team to help me achieve both.
So when I started my own lab in Jordan at the Hashemite University, I wanted to figure out, what is it that captured my attention? What could I establish? Because coming from the US where I was doing very high tech, advanced research, I didn’t have those resources in Jordan, and even if I did, they weren’t sustainable.
And yet, I wanted to contribute to science in a meaningful way, to do better science. So I took my time making observations, which all scientists do.
And you know, a scientist is seeing what everybody sees, but thinking what no one has thought. And because each one of us is unique, we see the world in a different way, in a different perspective.
And that’s when I noticed that in Jordan we have two populations, the Circassians and the Chechens, who have actually, they were evicted violently from their own homelands almost 200 years ago, and they fled what is today Russia, the Caucus mountains, and persecuted because of their religion.
They settled in Turkey, Palestine, Syria, Egypt, Libya and even in New Jersey, the United States. And ended up in among other places, in Jordan.
And when I looked into the literature, I discovered, first of all, that they’re a very ancient lineage of the human ancestry, and that no one had studied them.
So I actually had a treasure trove in my backyard to really contribute meaningfully to the world, to discover novel gene risk factors for disease that nobody else had discovered because of their very unique gene pool for these two populations.
And and of course, to do good science, I wanted to be inclusive and include people from those two communities to be on my team. And that’s what I did.
I went and found professor scientists who are actually from Chechen heritage or Circassian heritage, and together with the community, we designed the research protocols and the research design on how we wanted to understand these populations, document them, and then learn from them to benefit all of humanity.
We did multiple things. I mean, we looked at their anthropology, their history and culture. We looked at their physical appearances, we looked at their biomarkers.
We did epidemiology to look at what are the disorders that are more prevalent. And that’s why we chose diabetes, because it doesn’t have a taboo, and everybody has diabetes in Jordan, for that matter. And it’s a global epidemic, but also looking at their genetics and their pedigree.
So we built this wonderful trees, pedigree trees for the whole population that we gave back to the population. We shared all the data that we collected, whether it was individual data about the biochemistry.
And we recommended them to physicians in case we discovered somebody had a disease that they didn’t know about and lifestyle also specialists. But also we shared with them all the DNA database that we have created, which we still have, that can still serve for other scientists to use to discover novel things going forward.
And this giving back of the results of the community helps in building the trust and making science not more useful and more impactful going forward to serve humanity.
I think that’s very important, because they give us feedback as well. Without the feedback from the original community, we cannot understand what these results mean, and that is very, very important and very fundamental.
Science is about asking the right question And by taking my time and asking the right question through my observations, the research study of the Circassians and the Chechens is still ongoing. Because we have our DNA database, and we invite scientists from all over Jordan, all over the world, Circassians and Chechens as well, to come and access the DNA database to ask new questions.
For example, when COVID 19 happened, we immediately went back to the database and see, are these populations more susceptible or less susceptible? And what does tha mean in terms of inheritance. We look at forensic for example, markers we look at today for personalized medicine and pharmaceuticals.
So when you ask the right question, it keeps giving, and when you include the whole society, you are really benefiting all of humanity.
As a scientist, you know we’re driven by our curiosity, and curiosity is driven by observation. You look around you and you ask questions, use your mind and your critical thinking.
And I’m a daughter of refugees. My father and his family were living in West Jerusalem since the 11th century. But in 1948 he was violently evicted by Zionist forces and had to flee to Lebanon, and therefore, in a way, I have been a refugee in the past 75 years,
Also, observing the different rounds or waves of refugees that have come to Jordan, where I live now, whether it’s the Palestinian refugees on multiple waves, or the Syrian refugees, the Iraqi refugees, the Somalia refugees, the Sudan refugees. We even have Ukraine refugees.
I mean, Jordan has it all. But I think the recent influx of the Syrian refugees in 2011 is what piqued my curiosity again, trying to understand what is trauma.
Because when people talk about trauma in the Western canon, it’s all about a one event, and then after that we talk about post-traumatic disorder.
And to me, it’s like, “Wait, I’ve been living in trauma since 1948 so where’s the post? We haven’t reached that.”
So therefore, the framework that we use to understand trauma is not the right one, at least not for our cases, which is the majority of the world.
And so that got me very curious and to challenge: what is trauma?
How do we study it using a temporal lens? And then how do we understand its impact on our bodies as humans? When we started to try to understand the Syrian refugee context, because that was the one available and immediate in my surroundings in Jordan, is that people, when they study the impact of trauma, they look at mental health, and when they study mental health, they use surveys.
So I didn’t believe in the mental health surveys, because to me, I come from basic science, and I want something I can measure, really measure, not something that will change if I had a piece of chocolate or I cried because I was feeling emotional.
And so I went to look under the skin. I went to look at biomarkers of trauma, which I did. So we looked at hormones, for example, like cortisol, which is a stress hormone.
So when you’re stressed, it goes up, and if your stress goes away, it goes down, which is a good indicator of trauma. And we were using it to measure in Syrian refugee adolescence, how they responded to trauma, and whether interventions could reduce that trauma.
But I wanted to go even deeper. I wanted to look at epigenetics.
What is epigenetics? So as a person, you manifest in this world because of the genes you inherit from your parents, and also because of the environment you interact with, your lifestyle, what you eat and the trauma you get exposed to. And then it’s the interaction of the environment with your DNA that is what we call epigenetics.
And I was interested in that. I wanted to understand how does trauma, in its long form, continued exposure to trauma, impacts your DNA.
Now, when I say it impacts your DNA, it doesn’t change your DNA. It just turns on or off genes as a result of that exposure.
So the three questions we ask in the field of epigenetics is, one, what are those genes that are turned on and off by this environmental exposure, and in my case, trauma? Can we reverse those changes that are a result of trauma through certain interventions?
And the third thing, can those changes be transferred across generations, from a grandmother, say, to a grandchild? And epigenetics is a very, relatively new field, and these are the questions that are being asked.
So I wanted to do that, and so I used an intervention that I had developed almost 20 years ago now, and intervention is called We Love Reading, and it’s about changing mindsets through reading to nurture changemakers.
We just train youth and adults to read aloud to children in their native language from the local culture in a public space of their choice on a regular basis. That’s it. It’s very simple. So we propose the following research question.
These children, Syrian children or Palestinian children who have been exposed to trauma of war and displacement, what genes are turned off and on in them, and then can an intervention as simple as We Love Reading, as simple as reading aloud for once a week for a few months, actually reverse those epigenetic changes?
We already know that it does in terms of their emotional perception, in terms of their reducing their stress and improving their resilience.
But we wanted to go under the skin and look at epigenetics, but we also wanted to ask a third question, the more difficult one, which is, are those changes that a child is exposed to through trauma transferred across generations?
We already know that exposure to trauma can be transferred across three, even four generations in mice.
But nobody has done it in humans because of ethical considerations and that you cannot design such an experiment.
But because of trust and inclusivity, we were able to actually ask that question within the Syrian society. community.
So because my mother is Syrian, I was able to gain the trust of Syrian community. And actually, in 1980 there was a massacre done by the Assad regime.
So we were able to design a very intricate research design where we had grandmothers who were exposed to trauma when they were pregnant in 1980 and then we followed these grandmothers, their daughters and their granddaughters to see if there was an epigenetic signature transferred from the grandmother to the daughter to the granddaughter.
And of course, we had comparable cohorts, groups where the grandmother was not exposed to trauma, or the daughter was exposed to trauma,
And we were able to discover 34 genes that had an epigenetic signature as a result of that grandmother’s exposure, 21 in the second generation, in the mothers, and 14 in the granddaughters.
Now what does that mean? These genes were not identifiable in any known biological pathway. There are already identifiable biological pathways like immune system, or cancer or cell growth.
Well, these genes that we discovered that had this epigenetic signature were not in any one of those. So what does that mean?To us that means that the response to trauma is complex and non linear and multi dimensional.
And usually when genes don’t have a particular function already identified, that means they are responsible for a higher level of regulation that results in a cascade of changes with an output of a particular behaviour.
So in a normal lifetime of a person, you’re exposed to trauma. Your gene, for example, for the receptor for cortisol, is turned off, okay? And as a result of that, your cortisol is always high. You’re always stressed.
Maybe there’s an intervention that can turn on the gene again. Your receptor is on, your cortisol goes down, and so you reverse the effect of the trauma.
That’s linear one dimension within a lifetime. What we’ve proposed, that we have discovered, is that across multiple generations, you have turning on and off of a higher regulatory system, that, through a cascade, will result in multiple choices, multiple alternatives, giving the grandchildren agency and adaptability and diversity to make a choice of how they want to encounter future environments that we cannot even predict.
And to me, that is a positive way of looking at humans and how they evolve and how they survive, thrive and even flourish.
Because throughout history of human evolution, we have been exposed to different types of trauma. This is not the first time, and yet we survive and thrive and flourish.
So part of our success in surviving is because we have this adaptability, and we are going to use our discovery to go from victimhood and vulnerability to agency and adaptability, because now as a future generation, we have turned on all the higher regulatory genes so that we have options that we can we have agency over which is so much better, and it celebrates diversity.
It celebrates everybody in society, so every member of society is valued, is appreciated and celebrated, and they have something to contribute to society. They could be people who need help, and they could be heroes who don’t need help, and there could be anything in between.
And to me, that’s the message that we want to send out, and that we have learned through our research with trauma, but then you can take that framing and implement it on everything and every environmental encounter and how we respond to it as a human species.
And the implications of this is not just on how we do science and therefore doing it better, but it’s also on policy, on program design, on how we measure impact, and on all parts of our sectors of our life, how we can create a better future for humanity.
But most importantly, in any team I create, I make sure that I have people who are the subjects of the research to be part of the design, part of the data collection and part of the data analysis and explanation, because they know better than any one of us what this data means, what could it mean, and how it can be used for the betterment of themselves and for the betterment of humanity, and that’s one of my hallmarks.
And we go back to the community and actually share all the data in the local language in a very simplified form, so people can feel again, that feeling of agency, that they control what’s happening to them and they can contribute to their own lives going forward.
So these are some of my best practices that we do and practice and share with others so that they can benefit from it.
Deborah Daley: 17:42
In the next episode, we meet a Japanese environmental researcher who believes that bringing down language barriers will result in improved knowledge sharing, and in the long run, better science.
