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the bone marrow and white blood cells, which is known to be a possible underlying cause of haemorrhaging after giving birth. Eleven months later, doctors found a huge tumour trapped in the baby’s cheek.

Cancer cells tend to be pretty well skilled at making themselves invisible to the immune system. Mostly, this is because they are actually our own cells, not foreign invaders, and the disease comes from mutations that make the cells incapable of regulating their own growth. They divide and spread and expand in ways that would usually mark them for self-destruction. But they grow on. That doesn’t explain, however, why the mother’s cancer cells would not be attacked by the baby’s immune system.

When the doctors studied the cancer cells in the Japanese baby and samples taken from her deceased mother, they found that the cancer cells were missing a large chunk of DNA from chromosome 6. It is along this stretch of chromosome that the DNA normally produces the markers on to which our immune cells latch. In this case, the cancer cells passed from mother to child because the immune cells were not able to attack, and there was nothing the baby – no matter how vigilant her immune system might be – could do about it.

Inside the watery world of the womb, the growing baby receives many cues that affect its health. The body is primed in the womb for the environment in which the mother already lives. That, in turn, should increase the child’s own chances of growing to adulthood and reproducing successfully.

For example, if a mother eats too much or goes hungry, the foetus will adjust its nutritional needs in both the short and long term, preparing itself for a world in which it will either have easy access to food or need to be ready to go without. Among the most well-publicized studies of nutrition in the womb are studies of rodents that have had their diets restricted. In particular, scientists have been interested to find out how a mother’s calorie intake affects her fertility and the survival of her young. You might guess that a hungry mother rat would have fewer nutrients to share with its foetuses, and that less food would mean less offspring. This isn’t the case. When female rats were fed a calorie-restricted diet, the mothers enjoyed a longer span of fertility, giving birth to pups at more advanced ages. And when these dieting rats gave birth, the survival rates of their pups were dramatically better than for the offspring of rats that were allowed to eat to their heart’s content. For mother rats whose calorie intake was moderately restricted, over seventy-three percent of pups survived, whereas only twenty-two percent of pups survived that were born to mothers with an unrestricted diet.

Like the propensity to be allergic, however, humans are also programmed in ways that can make us oversensitive to certain chemicals, putting us at risk for related diseases. Coronary heart disease may also have its origins in the womb. Pregnant women who have impulsive, uncontrollable outbursts of temper (more incidents of slamming doors; loud, angry shouting; binge eating or drinking; smashing dishes; etc.) secrete higher levels of stress hormones, such as cortisol, which can cross through the placenta and reach the baby in the womb. Once there, the hormones change the way in which the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, or HPA, and the autonomic nervous system work, and both the HPA and this part of the nervous system appear to be important for programming disease into the foetus. Individuals who were overexposed to stress hormones in the womb exhibit long-term, stress-related behaviour as adults. These hormones also affect foetal heart development and may increase the risk for developing cardiovascular disease later in life. Being overweight is associated with the release of inflammatory factors in the body, and these factors can also affect the development of the lungs and the immune system in a foetus. So if a mother is overweight, her child may also have a higher risk of developing allergies and asthma.

Obesity, in particular, may be decided in the womb – long before a child gets around to putting anything into his or her mouth. If a mother gains excessive weight or has diabetes while she is pregnant, the foetus will adapt to an environment where there is an excess of sugar around. As a teenager, her child is more likely to have a high body mass index, or BMI, even if the child does not eat fatty foods. Mice or rats that are put on a high-fat and high-sugar diet that makes them obese have pups that grow up to have increased body fat and abnormally large appetites. In fact, even when these pups are kept on a healthy diet, their appetites mean they are far more likely to become obese on standard meals. They also have an abnormally high level in the blood of the protein leptin, which has a starring role in the way food is consumed and then metabolized into energy by the body. Other experiments on animals indicate that if a mother’s nutrition becomes imbalanced during pregnancy and breastfeeding, this permanently changes how – at the level of the brain – her offspring consume food as adults. The mother’s patterns of consumption actually alter the developing hypothalamus, the almond-sized part of the brain that controls basic biological functions such as hunger, thirst, fatigue, and temperature. The hypothalamus produces the hormones that control when we feel hungry and desire food, as well as those that control aggression and sexual behaviour.

Bizarrely, because of how imprinting works, a father also sways his child’s life after birth, through the timed influence of his genes. Some of a father’s genes, in fact, only become expressed after a baby has been weaned, and they can have a significant effect at much