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 Umeå University in Sweden measured telomere length in 132 people from 49 families. They found…
