We may have less control over how long we live than previously thought
Subscribe to The Post Most newsletter for the most important and interesting stories from The Washington Post. Uri Alon was long puzzled by a textbook statistic: Longevity, the thinking went, was about 20 percent in our genes. “That makes you think what’s the rest of the 80 percent: Is it the lifestyle? Why should we study genes for lifespan if it’s not that important? It kind of bothered me,” said Alon, a physicist turned systems biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Alon us