![]() “The wonderful thing, compared with chronological age, is that biological age is modifiable. To Morgan Levine, “ only 10-30% of our lifespan is estimated to be due to genetics”: Relativizing genetics’ importance in aging Still, this notion is mistaken since our body, its health, and the way it looks and ages is a dynamic system influenced by hundreds of thousands of genes, some of whom carry potential instructions from previous hominins but also other organisms such as bacteria, “and the environment in which those genes are acting makes all the difference to how we turn out,” explains Journalist Carl Zimmer, author of the 2018 book She Has Her Mother’s Laugh.Īccording to Zimmer, “we cannot understand the natural world with a simplistic notion of “genetic heredity,” and the popular notion of a correlation between genes and clearcut functions is a misconception: the Mendelian laws of inheritance are not just “exquisitely fragile” but “regularly broken.” Complex traits arise out of the combined action of hundreds of genes depending on the environment an individual grows up in. We tend to imagine that the genes inherited from our ancestors are the only real culprits of how heredity manifests. “Nude Old Man in the Sun” (oil on canvas by Mariano Fortuny, 1871) Fortuny was influenced by the style of Jusepe de Ribera click over the image to see it in detail with the Prado Museum’s multimedia tool Morgan Levine (who recently left the department of Pathology at Yale Unversity to join Altos Labs, a biotech company trying to slow down human aging) tries to convince us how the cutting-edge research on aging should make us think more seriously about lifestyle and not only about heredity. We have a fixed age based on our birth, our chronological age, and a malleable, biological age, “which can be affected by our lifestyle choices.”įrench writer Victor Hugo stated that our forties are the old age of youth, whereas our fifties are the youth of old age, but how much truth is there in our own perception of age? In her recent book True Age, pathology professor Morgan Levine makes the case to distinguish between two concepts of aging. ![]()
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