The Last Thing You’d Want to Know

On Saturday, June 22, The Globe and Mail carried a story by Ivan Semeniuk titled “How science plans to help us live to 150 – and soon.” It suggests that a scientific exploration of our cells could throw light on our longevity – or shortevity.

Ivan Semeniuk writes:

“It involves telomeres – which, if you haven’t had to think about this yet, are tiny structures at the ends of your chromosomes that keep them from fraying and losing crucial bits of genetic information. What interests researchers who study aging is that when cells divide, their telomeres get shorter. Once they get too short, cells stops dividing and may die. Played out across the whole body, there’s mounting evidence that shorter telomeres translate into increased susceptibility to diseases and the gradual wearing out of tissues that is the hallmark of old age.”

A test not unlike this one was anticipated by Eric Koch in his futuristic novel The Last Thing You’d Want to Know (the date of your death), published in 1976 by Tundra Press in Montreal and later in German paperback by Heyne Verlag in Munich. Its premise was that in the American election of 1984 the Democratic candidate proposed a rational, scientific way of determining the date of a person’s death unless the person is killed by a bus – using a test not unlike the one the Globe described – while the Republican candidate put forward an irrational way, i.e., hocus pocus, to achieve the same result. That candidate was a gorgeous Californian witch. The novel was written in the aftermath of the ’sixties when witches, especially in California, were commonplace.

Guess who won the election.