(Chronological) Age-proof

It is more than a century since the last quotient was designed. The mental quotient,

(Mental age / Chronological age) x 100

marked the dawn of the era of measuring intelligence and thence came the management dictum that anything that cannot be measured does not exist. That gave rise to MS Excel and we know what that spawned – less and less use of intelligence. Excelitis.

Something similar is beginning to happen now. The longevity quotient (a neologism coined by me). The new quotient has the support of a Nobel Prize winning effort to understand the role played by the tips of operational segments in the genome of a human being.

As a salute to the facility of some of our scientists to talk to the lay public but without talking down, let me say it is all about how the metallic tips of shoelaces keep the lace threads from unravelling. The aglet mobilizes and then controls the functionality of the threads in the lace.

These aglets are called telomeres and three scientists (Elizabeth Blackburn, to whom I was introduced through the pages of a two-part detailed article in Frontline prior to her winning the prize and on which I had blogged elsewhere, Jack Szostack, an Israeli scientist and the only male among the three, and Carol Greider, whose one time assistant is leading the current effort at measuring longevity) shared the prize in 2009 for unravelling (again that word!) how these tips work.

Now, what happens to telomeres as one ages? “[B]iological ageing grinds at your telomeres,” says Giles Tremlett in his article Can a blood test really tell you when you’ll die? in The Guardian of October 11, 2011. While time, discarding the effects of relativity, flows constantly for everyone, the grinding rate is affected by genes, the environment and one’s personal habits. And, this differential is sought to be translated into the metric that I am calling longevity quotient.

Here is where Mario Blasco, the head of Spain’s cancer research centre and a co-founder of a company Life length, and a former trainee under Carol Grieder, the Prize winner, enters the picture. She is carrying out a programme of finding out how the number of short telomeres in a person’s genome could be translated into a predictive tool for the potential for diseases, particularly cancer.

However, the article, perhaps paraphrasing the scientist, says “[S]hort telomeres do not just provide evidence of ageing. They also cause it.” In this, I see the business interest of the scientist perhaps intruding into her scientific objectivity. It is obviously good for the scientist to create a flutter amongst the unsuspecting public by saying, “We offer to measure the predominance of short telomeres in your genome, which we think will show how long you are likely to live.” The name of the company, Life Length, almost screams this message. Surely a conflict of interest?

Let that be. Blanco’s teacher is not too enamoured of such a metric; “The science isn’t really there to tell us what the consequences are of your telomere length.” But, Elizabeth Blackburn, one of the other two co-winners of the Prize and who also plans to offer telomere testing through her company Telome Health sides with Blanco (the male scientist in this scene is staying out of the cat fight [deliberate stereotyping!], it appears). It does get more curious, this convergence and divergence between the scientific minds on the one side and the business minds on the other side and the meta-correlation!

As an interested lay man, therefore, I have to reserve my judgment and more importantly keep the antennae up on this issue as it gets played out over time. But, the media outlets are neither so careful nor so conscientious. “Some newspapers … have gleefully announced that the test …can predict [my emphasis] when I will die,” says the author (who was waived off the fee, £ 500, for the test) of the article.

I hope you noticed the irony in the above. The Guardian, a paper I have a fondness for, is not above sensationalism and trickery in trying to boost its sales. Why did it blare the phrase, “… when you’ll die” in its headline? I’ll tell you that even a sober title, like “A special blood test may correlate with your age at death, scientists say” would have got me to reading this piece. And, now I understand why that sensationalism in the tile, even while decrying it.

Now, a short foray into the metric. I suggest,

Longevity Quotient = (Biological Age / Chronological Age) x 100.

Say when you are 60 (like I will be in a few years from now), if your biological age is, as determined from the telomere test, 20 years more than your chronological age, you may have no business living! One has to reflect deeply on this quotient to see the good and the bad sides of it and decide whether we want to proceed.

The bad parts of it, as I can discern at first instance, there will be a differential in health insurance rates following a demand from such insurers that these tests have to be taken to be eligible to be insured. Isn’t this similar to the biggest problems in private health insurance schemes being endlessly debated in the US?

In the article it is suggested that stressful life may shorten telomeres faster. Then, no wonder that politicians when they are incarcerated immediately develop all kinds of health problems. But, that is not my concern here. In case they are absolved of wrongdoing, can they not sue the government for shortening their life?

Telomeres, it appears, cannot be unshortened. It is an irreversible process, as of now. The pharmaceutical giants are salivating at the prospect of developing telomere-restoring drugs and treatments! Telomerase activation is the name of the research game, to (chronological) age-proof your life.

To conclude after this reasonably long discourse, mental quotient, as I said at the beginning, gave rise to Excelitis.

What would Longevity Quotient do, say 50 years from now?

I do not know.

Do you?

Raghuram Ekambaram