A New Test Predicts When You’ll Die (Give or Take a Few Years)
And insurance companies are already interested
Soothsaying was once a fringe pursuit — the purview of psychics, subway cranks, and speed-addicted sci-fi novelists. Today, it’s big business. Abetted by new technology, thousands of salaried STEM types are now engaged in figuring out the future.
Among this crowd, Steve Horvath, a biostatistician at the University of California, Los Angeles, stands out. He isn’t trying to predict what you’ll buy next or whether you’ll commit a violent crime after being paroled from prison. His project, almost magisterially bleak, is to figure out how much of the future you’ll actually get to see.
In a paper published this week in Aging, Horvath and his colleague Ake T. Lu formally announced a project they’ve been teasing for a couple months now: a “time to death” clock called DNAm GrimAge that they claim can predict, better than any other tool, when a given person might die. It was announced in tandem with AgeAccelGrim, which provides a countdown to the year you’ll develop cancer or coronary heart disease. Horvath said he can estimate the number of cigarettes someone has smoked in their lifetime and predict when they’ll go through menopause.
There’s a whiff of Theranos to Horvath’s…
