Opinion

To the Point - How we hold the future

Professor Robert Winston explores the importance of nurture and highlights how adverse early experiences can affect the function of DNA in the brain

The tyrannical government of Nicolae Ceausescu sought to make the State of Romania stronger and more populous.

Among other initiatives, it imposed a ban on contraception and abortion; a side-effect of this policy was that many babies were born to mothers who could not afford to feed them. When a blood-thirsty revolution brutally ended that totalitarian regime in 1989, hideous things were uncovered in Romania. After the sordid execution of Ceausescu in a side-street in Bucharest, Western journalists flocked into the country. Among the most disturbing items on the television news were photographs of emaciated children abandoned by their parents, lying in squalor in various orphanages.

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