BIN those tarot cards and cancel the visit to the palm reader. It might one day be possible to predict how long you’ll live from a sample of your white blood cells.
It is well known that the children of long-lived parents tend to be long-lived too, but no one knows why. As white blood cells fend off infection, in effect they are delaying death. So Sonya Vasto and her colleagues at the University of Palermo in Italy wondered whether these cells might hold any clues to longevity.
The team took samples of white blood cells from 45 men and…
