CERTAIN traits can be easily traced to one parent, be it a big nose from dad or sharp cheekbones from mum. Now it seems that our lifespans might be inherited – but only from our fathers.
One factor influencing how long we live is the length of the telomere caps on the ends of our chromosomes. Each time a cell divides, its telomeres get shorter – until they are so short that the cell can no longer divide, and it dies.
Katarina Nordfjäll and her colleagues at UmeÃ¥ University in Sweden measured telomere length in 132 people from 49 families. They found…
