ABOVE: Children in Keneba, The Gambia, including this hours-old baby, are part of a long-term investigation into the epigenetics of nutrition and health.
FELICIA WEBB
Summertime in The Gambia, a tiny West African country of rivers, salt flats, and baobab trees, means the start of the rainy season. “Everything is turning green,” says nutrition scientist Andrew Prentice over the phone from his home in the rural village of Keneba. “It’s gorgeous.” Prentice leads the UK’s Medical Research Council International Nutrition Group station in Keneba, about three hours’ drive from the main MRC unit in Fajara, near the coast.
For the subsistence farmers in Keneba, the rainy season is also the hungry season; stores of last year’s harvest run low, and the next round of crops is just being planted. The cyclical nature of the villagers’ nutrition has provided what Prentice calls an “experiment of nature” that he and his colleagues can ...
