Nature via nurture again!

Orphaned Babies Show Hormone Disruption Years after Adoption

Alison Wismer Fries and her colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison compared 21 typical youngsters from Milwaukee to 18 children who had been adopted by Milwaukee area residents after spending their first year or so in Romanian and Russian orphanages. Using urine samples, they found that the adopted orphans had significantly lower levels of vasopressin--a hormone that plays a role in familial recognition--circulating in their systems than their peers.