Reproductive Fate Versus Environment

摘要

Women's fertility is determined in large part at birth. They are born with their total number of ovarian follicles, for example, which normally influences the age at which menopause begins. But in the 1990s, researchers proposed that if a child's energy is depleted by malnutrition, disease, or other factors, he or she would be less fertile as an adult. By using the natural experiment of migration, researchers demonstrated in a talk how differences during childhood do indeed alter the course of reproduction in adult women.