Estimates indicate that between 20 and 50 percent of our longevity is determined by a set of genes .
And the first person who wanted to take advantage of this idea to create a future humanity much longer lived was not an entrepreneur from Silicon Valley, but a man born in the middle of the 19th century: Alexander Graham Bell .
Centennial children
Grandson of the famous London professor who inspired George Bernard Shaw to create Mr. Higgins of Pygmalion (or the film version, My Fair Lady ), Bell became so interested in sound that, thanks to his inventiveness, he was able to carry out the first telephone call in history, on March 10, 1876. However, the true paternity of the telephone surely corresponds to the Italian Antonio Meucci .
In addition to that, in his last years of life, Bell came to carry out visionary research for the time. One of them, the least known, had to do with longevity genetics.
After studying the case followed by numerous geneticists of William Hyde , one of the Pilgrim Fathers of the United States, and his 8,797 descendants, he came to the conclusion that people who tended to be longer lived also had longer children, so why What not to create a database for them to be more sexually successful? As I explain in That was not in my genetics book:
His idea for this kind of longevity Tinder was for the country’s children to be interviewed about the age of their parents and grandparents, and then to make all the data public, along with the dates of death and death dates. ages at which they occurred. In this way, with this catalog of names and addresses, which he called the human pedigree , there would be a greater probability that the descendants of the longest-lived families would decide to go on romantic dates and eventually fall in love and have children.
The problem is that, although the idea of having children who will live longer than the average is a very juicy idea, it does not seem to be enough of an incentive to promote love. At least no more than physical attractiveness or money. Therefore, after Bell’s death in 1922, the project was left unfinished . All in all, it could be the matter of a good uchrony of the type what would have happened if it worked?