"The epigenetic appearance is like clothing for DNA. It's like when a person puts on different clothes, he or she may exhibit different dispositions," says Huang, who raises the theory that epigenetic changes are also inheritable.

She says in laboratory tests, the obesity rates of children conceived when the parents were overweight and after they lost weight showed obvious differences.

Huang also observed from lab tests that mental stress during the phase of planning to have children also affected the health of the offspring.

"If a mouse is caged in an irritating environment every day, the offspring conceived during those times will show a higher incidence of offensive behavior," she says.

Huang's theory led to a 10-year research program by the World Health Organization that has been carried forward in China, India, South Africa and Canada for nearly four years, as a way to test the theory through practice.

The program recruits couples currently planning to have babies, and divides them into a study group and a control group. For the study group, doctors contacted the couples every day to advise them on their exercise regimes and their calorific intake, she explains.

"We focused on obesity, a global health concern, in this study. These children will be followed by our team from birth to the age of 5 to monitor their health and learning ability," she says.

Such research is also an effort to explore the cause of chronic diseases from the initial developmental stages of life and will shed new light on the pathogenesis of conditions such as metabolic and cardiovascular diseases. In case of breakthroughs, this will contribute to both the patients and to society, Huang says.

She became an academician with the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2017, the only doctor from the fields of obstetrics and gynecology elected as an academician after the departure of the late Lin Qiaozhi, one of the founders of modern Chinese gynecology.

"As one of the country's top experts in obstetrics and gynecology, professor Huang has always kept in mind the noble tradition of making contributions to human health, changing the destinies of patients suffering from infertility and providing clinical pathways for families to produce healthy offspring," reads an open letter congratulating Huang from the Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine on becoming an academician.

The International Peace Maternity and Child Health Hospital is affiliated with the university.