Ask an epigenetics researcher what they study, and the standard story you'll hear goes something like this...

"Sometimes a little methyl group (i.e. -CH3) gets stuck on the side of a strand of DNA. Turns out these guys are pretty important! They're copied over when cells replicate, so they stick around long-term, and they can activate or repress (usually repress) nearby genes on the DNA strand. In particular, different types of cells all have the same DNA code, but something has to be different in order for the cells to "remember" what type they are and behave differently. And sure enough, those methyl modifications differ across cell types! They're like an extra information storage mechanism, on top of the DNA, which can encode things like cell type and make different cell types behave differently, among other forms of memory."

That story is wrong. Many of the details are correct [...]

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.