Anyone can access all the research papers in medicine and biology via the free search engine PubMed. Do a PubMed search for “cancer” and you will get links to 4.97 million papers, with the most recent first. Querying for “gene” yields 3.34 million links, “viruses” 1.44 million, and “mutations” 1.27 million. The numbers increase by the day. But search for “paramutations” and you should find only some 220 papers or so. This is because research on paramutations is only just taking off.
Many people know that mutations in genes can cause cancer. And the COVID-19 pandemic heightened people’s awareness of, and dread towards, viruses. In this milieu, paramutations are changes that can protect humans against viruses. Researchers Almoro Scarpa and Robert Kofler, of the Institute for Population Genetics in Vienna, Austria, showed how they do so in a paper published in the journal Genetics on October 11.
