If you could know exactly when you were going to die, would you want to know? Would the knowledge spur you into action, kick-starting a whirlwind of activity as you attack your bucket list with renewed vigor before you kick the bucket? Or would you be crippled with fear, instead preferring an ignorance is bliss approach that would let you enjoy your life without having to stress about the fact that your time was actively counting down?
If you’re in the first camp I may have some good news for you. A DNA test that can allegedly predict when you’re going to die. So much so, that the test has drawn the interest of life insurance companies which is never a good sign.
As Daniel Kolitz writes on Medium:
“Soothsaying was once a fringe pursuit — the purview of psychics, subway cranks, and speed-addicted sci-fi novelists. Today, it’s big business. Abetted by new technology, thousands of salaried STEM types are now engaged in figuring out the future.
Among this crowd, Steve Horvath, a biostatistician at the University of California, Los Angeles, stands out. He isn’t trying to predict what you’ll buy next or whether you’ll commit a violent crime after being paroled from prison. His project, almost magisterially bleak, is to figure out how much of the future you’ll actually get to see.
In a paper published this week in Aging, Horvath and his colleague Ake T. Lu formally announced a project they’ve been teasing for a couple months now: a ‘time to death’ clock called DNAmGrimAge that they claim can predict, better than any other tool, when a given person might die. It was announced in tandem with AgeAccelGrim, which provides a countdown to the year you’ll develop cancer or coronary heart disease. Horvath said he can estimate the number of cigarettes someone has smoked in their lifetime and predict when they’ll go through menopause.”
I don’t know about you but I would want to know when I was going to die. Armed with that knowledge I could accelerate my timetable for doing things, freeing me up to see as much of the world as possible before my time ran out. But I can understand why others wouldn’t want to know. Why others would refer to DNA as Do Not Ask.
It’s not an easy choice to make. One that could have far-reaching implications for how we live our lives. Thankfully we have plenty of time to figure out what we want to do before this technology gets perfected. Unless of course, if your time is already numbered…
Is a DNA test for determining when you will die the Greatest Idea Ever?
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