I found several questionable areas in this study. The largest is the way the researchers arrived at the concluding sentence, “We suggest that an individual’s genetic architecture moderates the magnitude and direction of the physiological response to exogenous stressors.” They deliberately skewed the experimental 40-person sample, then made “findings” by pretending that contrasting two 20-person skewed samples of 9-year old boys represented something about stress and genetics in a larger population of children without proving their case.

Researchers cannot validly do this in children’s brain studies, for a comparable example. It is well known that long-term stress causes a child’s brain to develop differently than an unstressed child’s brain.

Further, instead of establishing a control group, the researchers split their sample according to maternal depression, which is a experimentally proven contributor to epigenetic changes detrimental to a developing fetus and on to infancy and early childhood. There are dozens of studies on that subject from which to choose on PNAS.org.

So, of course, in general “..an individual’s genetic architecture moderates the magnitude and direction of the physiological response to exogenous stressors.” But the researchers didn’t do the work to find out whether it was the genetic architecture that the 9-year-olds were epigenetically changed into, or the genetic architecture they were conceived with, that stored the damage. I presume that this additional work wasn’t pursued because those type of findings wouldn’t make the race-baiting headlines of the press coverage this study was designed for.

Which leads me to ask – Was this study published to further an agenda other than make a contribution to science?

If so, does this study also represent a failure of the peer review process? Were the reviewers even interested in advancing science?