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Just 20 years ago, molecular biologists Leonie Ringrose and Renato Paro published an article provocatively entitled ‘Remembering Silence’. The article focused on how modified epigenetic elements could subsequently return to their silent state (i.e. their epigenetic status before experimental or environmentally induced modulation). Ringrose and Paro raised a question of considerable importance to expanding research in human neuroepigenetics, that of reversibility. For neuroepigeneticists interested in the molecular impact of environments on individuals’ biological profiles, including epigenetic modifications thought to be mediators between life trauma and risk of psychopathology, this question could be translated as: if you experience a traumatic event and thus acquire an epigenetic state considered pathological, can you free yourself of that state? In this chapter, we examine researchers’ ambitions to account for the indeterminacy of life and the speculative possibility of reversing acquired epigenetic states. Bringing together the perspectives of medical anthropology and molecular biology, we explore how reversibility – a return to silence – is envisioned, how therapeutic interventions purported to bring about that silence might function, and what this might mean for the mental health of people who live in the aftermath of trauma.
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