A few weeks ago, I took a break from work to spit into a tube, then mailed it to Elysium Health, a company that promised—for $300—to search my gob of saliva for an important secret: when I will die.
Or, technically speaking, my biological age. Compared to chronological age, “bio-age” may better reflect how well your body is resisting Father Time. Bio-age is based on chemical marks, or epigenetic changes, that affect how genes are expressed. Because epigenetic changes accumulate over time, they may show how fast we’re aging. In recent years, scientists have used machine learning and algorithms to identify which epigenetic changes reveal the most about the aging process.
