Our parents’ genes, even the ones we didn’t inherit, leave a measurable lasting imprint on our lives. An international team led by researchers at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) and the Norwegian Institute of Public Health developed a new approach to analyze genetic data from tens of thousands of families. The study, published this Tuesday in Cell Genomics, found that for height, body weight, and school test performance, the environment shaped by our parents’ genes can be nearly as important as the genes we actually inherited from them.