Longevity Is More Genetic than We Thought. That’s a Good Thing
Time · LC · trust 53/100
Living to a great old age seems to run in families . Centenarian studies show that siblings of people who reach 105 are 35 times more likely than average to reach that age themselves. But curiously, attempts to uncover how much of human lifespan is genetic have historically come back with somewhat low numbers, around 20-30%.
In January 2026, Uri Alon, director of the Sagol Institute for Longevity Research at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and his colleagues made headlines with a new take on the problem, where they asked what happens if you remove deaths from accidents, infections, and other factors—beyond diseases of aging—from the equation. Under those conditions, they found that longevity is about 50% down to genes : far more than previously calculated. That result, which seems to imply that lifespan is less controlled by lifestyle, may help lead researchers to target specific genes and proteins with drugs and treatments that could help slow aging.
A proclivity for science seems to run through Alon’s own genes. A systems biologist who trained in physics, he is a fourth-generation scientist. “Here comes the professor!” Alon’s parents joked when he was born.
His mother, a physicist, taught him to love math from an early age. “She gave me lots of equations to solve, and that's, for me, the language of love,” he says. “The world was very scary for her, as a Holocaust survivor. She liked to talk about the things that are safe and beautiful, like physics.”
Alon has an eclectic assortment of research projects underway. “We're working on the question of what determines maximal human lifespan,” he says. “It's around 120. Why hasn’t it budged, even though your median lifespan has doubled in the last 200 years?” He is also following up on discoveries from another group showing that women with later menopause seem to have specific, perhaps beneficial variants of DNA repair genes , which are thought to slow aging. “Now the menopause people are being invited to all the aging conferences,” he says. “I think it’s an amazing development.”
Of this year’s new finding, “I think there's a great incentive to study the genetics of aging,” he says. “The reason to do that is because the biggest risk factor for all the major age-related diseases—the biggest risk factor for cancer, dementia, metabolic disease, and heart disease—is aging. So, if we can slow down the rate of aging, we basically do preventative medicine on all the age-related diseases in one fell swoop.”
Alon stresses that even if genes play a bigger role than realized in determining lifespan, it doesn’t mean that exercise, good diet, and sleep don’t also matter. “You need that in order for our genes to express themselves in their optimal way,” he says. “After the study, I still swim and eat salads for lunch.”
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