How long is your tail?

Our lives depend on the length of our tails. Yes, we have tails — tails that are at the ends of our chromosomes and when they shorten, we fall hostage to the ravages of time. These tails are called telomeres and their length is the signature of your lifeline — in molecular form. This means that as you age, it gets shorter, and the shorter it gets, the more susceptible you are to diseases associated with aging. It is like a newspaper dance. As you dance your way into your life, the newspaper gets folded and folded until no more and the music ends. Lately, scientists have taken science a step further and identified the genes that may be affecting the length of those tails.

The study is entitled “Genetic variation in human telomerase is associated with telomere length in Ashkenazi centenarians by Gil Miook Cho, Richard M. Cawthon, Temuri Budagov, Micol Katz, Xiaoman Yang, Glenn Siegel, Aviv Bergman, Derek M. Huffman, Clyde B. Schechter, Woodring E. Wright, Jerry W. Shay, Nir Barzilai, Diddahally R. Govindaraju, and Yousin Suh. It is published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the US Early Edition.

They did it this way. They investigated three groups on the state of their physical and mental health and looked at the length of the telomeres and the activity of the telomerase gene, the gene that may have a direct effect on the length of the tail of life. The first group is composed of centenarians aged between 95 to 105 and the second group consists of their offspring aged between 44 to 85. The third group, the control group consists of individuals aged 43 to 94 who had no history of longevity in their families. All of them are from a genetically and culturally homogenous group called Ashkenazi Jews. Having all of them come from this kind of “closed group” makes it much easier to recognize if indeed the length of telomeres can be inherited.

The results confirmed the suspicion of researchers. The “longer-tailed” centenarians and their offspring had much lower age-related diseases and had significantly better lipid profiles (levels of “good and bad” cholesterol) than the control group. This pointed to the much higher chances of inheriting long telomeres. The centenarian and offspring groups also had significantly better cognitive functions. In another test, those centenarians in the control group who had impaired cognitive function had shorter telomeres than the centenarians who did well in the cognitive tests. The scientists also found out that variations in the telomere genes affect the length of these tails, which means that they may have found the genes that control the length of our molecular lives.

But before you embark on any genetic adventure with your doctor to lengthen your telomeres, be warned that the researchers do not think it is as simple as making your telomerase gene work overtime. Genes are not independent switches. When you turn a gene on or off, it may affect the work of other genes. What could lengthened “tails” cost you? How would the human brain react to a life that is running longer than the usual? More studies would have to be done to know the answers.

Writing these science columns over the years gives me joy and understanding. But it also gave me something that I never thought writing science could give: a grandmother. Yes, an 86-year-old grandmother I call Lola Nora. She first started sending me email about three years ago and since then, she has regularly sent me her comments on my columns, her questions, her musings about life, even her adventures with the occasional glass of red wine. I have become very fond of her. I think my Lola Nora will ask me the obvious rhetorical question: How long should a life be to guarantee a good measure of happiness?

I have no idea. Recently, I sent her a book called The Fountain of Age by Betty Friedan. Betty Friedan is also the author of a landmark book called The Feminine Mystique (1963) which revealed the “hidden” desperation of women (middle class Americans then) having to identify only with the lives of their husbands and children. In 1993, at 72 years old, Friedan wrote The Fountain of Age to make the case that aging holds its own unique and precious adventures into “personhood” and that aging is not a mere departure from youth. Friedan died in 2006 at 85 years old.

I read the Fountain of Age sixteen years ago when I was 27 years old. Now at 43, this business of aging seems more real to me now. I sometimes wonder if I could still rely on The Fountain of Age to give me the occasional splashes of wisdom when aging often just seems like a losing battle with gravity, uric acid and germs. But more than the book, I also have Lola Nora as a living lesson on what longevity could mean. She has not stopped asking questions, wants to learn science and takes the time to send me email on these things. This also tells you that the famous Lola Techie is a junior compared to my Lola Nora.

Neither me nor Lola Nora would probably ever see the length of Lola Nora’s telomeres but it does not matter. She is living every fold of that tail. Her own newspaper life dance continues to be eventful and graceful. She often now speaks about already being at the tail of her life but boy, does that tail swing! So how long a tail do we need to live out the tales of our lives? If you take it from my Lola Nora, I guess it is not how long the tail is but more importantly, how well you swing it.

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