Want to know the length of your life?

On any day in the 21st century, you can be omniscient (know anything at anytime if you can access the Internet), be everywhere (through mobile computing), and lately, there is a good chance you can even know how long your life would be with a simple biological test. 

The test involves measuring the length of your “tails” — the ends of your chromosomes. Telomeres have been established in science to be reliably linked to the length of our lives. The longer they are, as have been found in centenarians, the longer you live; and of course, you know what shorter ones would mean. These “tails” shorten as you grow old so having a short one to start with, you may have less to live with. It is like a newspaper dance where the paper gets continuously folded until there is barely enough to dance on and the music stops and the dance of your life is no more.

I do not know how one would get the results but I do not see why it cannot be online. These days, everything can be online secured by a password. I had my own DNA results from the National Genographic Project known to me online with a password they sent me. For the “tail test” I can imagine that when you get it, you may be even able to download it as a PDF file which you would store somewhere in your personal folder in your computer. Who would have foreseen this that in one of the many files in your own computer is a file that has the probable length of your life.

Around two years ago, I have written about the discovery of genes that control the length of these telomeres. This time, the story continues as I have come across articles in the NYTimes.com last May 18 by Andrew Pollack entitled “A Blood Tests Offers Clues to Longevity” and Slate.com last July 28 entitled, “What Can our Telomeres Tell Us?” by Amanda Shaffer mentioning companies that have sprung up offering to test the telomere lengths of people. Imagine, you could now give any of your cells which would have your chromosomes and these companies could measure it for you.

This is the age-old question that has inspired philosophers, authors and filmmakers across time — if you knew how long your life would be, what would you change? This was what some were saying about having your telomeres measured — you can plan your life. Knowing how robust the evidence seems to be for telomeres and length of life, I will not be surprised if this is now being discussed in the boardrooms of insurance companies. This is quite worrisome if I carry the idea to the extreme where those who are found to have long telomeres would be part of some kind of telomere “elite” in society and those with short ones, well, just have to accept it because there is no known cure for short telomeres. 

But are “tails” the only biological markers that could tell tales of longevity? No. If you smoke, have a history of cancer or of other diseases, they pretty much could also tell you how much you cut out of the normal life expectancy. Interesting and cheaper is a test mentioned in the Slate article that also was a pretty reliable indicator of life length. In that test, scientists asked strangers to tell which of the twins in the photos they showed was older. The ones perceived to be older turned out to be the one who died first.  

Telomere length, health risks, older looking faces — you could take the tests for these to measure how long your life could be. That is what we count on science for and it seems that it has been on a roll to deliver it. But beyond these tests, I would like to think that we all yearn for something to show for that measured life. I think that when the music stops and the newspaper on which we dance has folded its last, we would want our dance to have been neither merely “long” nor “short.” Beyond any religion, social status or scientific understanding of what determines the length of one’s life, here is my ideal tombstone:

Here lies another one of us

She tried with all her might

For each breath to matter

More than the last.

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