The £400 test that tells you how long you'll live DNA breakthrough heralds new medical era – and opens ethical Pandora's box

A blood test that can show how fast someone is ageing – and offers the tantalising possibility of estimating how long they have left to live – is to go on sale to the general public in Britain later this year.

Graphic: How the test works

The controversial test measures vital structures on the tips of a person's chromosomes, called telomeres, which scientists believe are one of the most important and accurate indicators of the speed at which a person is ageing.

Scientists behind the €500 (£435) test said it will be possible to tell whether a person's "biological age", as measured by the length of their telomeres, is older or younger than their actual chronological age.

Medical researchers believe that telomere testing will become widespread within the next five or 10 years, but there are already some scientists who question its value and whether there should be stronger ethical controls over its wider use. In addition to concerns about how people will react to a test for how "old" they really are, some scientists are worried that telomere testing may be hijacked by unscrupulous organisations trying to peddle unproven anti-ageing remedies and other fake elixirs of life.

The results of the tests might also be of interest to companies offering life-insurance policies or medical cover that depend on a person's lifetime risk of falling seriously ill or dying prematurely. However, there is a growing body of scientific opinion that says testing the length of a person's telomeres could provide vital insights into the risk of dying prematurely from a range of age-related disorders, from cardiovascular disease to Alzheimer's and cancer. "We know that people who are born with shorter telomeres than normal also have a shorter lifespan. We know that shorter telomeres can cause a shorter lifespan," said Maria Blasco of the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre in Madrid, who is the inventor of the new commercial telomere test. "But we don't know whether longer telomeres are going to give you a longer lifespan. That's not really known in humans," she added.

"What is new about this test is that it is very precise. We can detect very small differences in telomere length and it is a very simple and fast technique where many samples can be analysed at the same time. Most importantly, we are able to determine the presence of dangerous telomeres – those that are very short."

Dr Blasco's company, Life Length, is in talks with medical diagnostic companies across Europe, including the UK, to market the test and collect blood samples for analysis in Spain. A deal with a company operating in Britain is likely within a year, she said.

"We need to have a clinical company to send us the blood [samples]. We are in contact with several groups in the UK who are interested," Dr Blasco said.

Life Length is anticipating hundreds of requests from people wanting to have their telomeres tested and is expecting demand from thousands more once the company is able to bring down the cost of the test as public demand increases.

Although Life Length is not the only company selling telomere tests, it is the only one gearing up for over-the-counter sales to the public and the only company with an accurate-enough test to be of practical use, said Professor Jerry Shay of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centre in Dallas.

"This test devised by Blasco is so accurate that it is likely to provide more useful information than some of the other tests out there right now," said Professor Shay, who is a scientific consultant for Life Length. "What's important in ageing is the shortest telomeres. What makes cells stop growing is the shortest telomeres, not the average telomere length, which is what other tests look at.

"Everyone talks about the chronological age, but there is also a biological age, and telomere length is actually a pretty good representation of your biological age. Telomeres are important – there is no question of that," he said.

Asked why the general public would be interested in taking a telomere test, Dr Shay said: "I think people are just basically curious about their own mortality. If you ask people what they worry about, most people would say they are worried about dying."

He added: "People might say 'If I know I'm going to die in 10 years I'll spend all my money now', or 'If I'm going to live for 40 more years I'll be more conservative in my lifestyle'. The worrying thing is that if this information ever got to a point where it is believable, insurance companies would start requiring it in terms of insuring people.

"If you smoke or you're obese your insurance rates are higher, and if you have short telomeres your insurance rates might be higher too."

Scientists do not yet believe they can narrow down the test prediction to calculate the exact number of months and years a person has yet to live, but several studies have indicated that individuals with telomeres that shorter than normal are likely to die younger than those with longer telomeres. Telomere research is considered to be one of the most exciting areas in biomedical science and last year the Nobel Prize in medicine was shared between three scientists who are pioneers in the field.

Interestingly, one of the Nobel laureates, Elizabeth Blackburn of the University of California San Francisco, is an enthusiastic proponent of telomere testing while another of the prize-winners, Carol Greider of Harvard Medical School, is more sceptical of its benefits.

"Do I think it's useful to have a bunch of companies offering to measure telomere length so people can find out how old they are? No," Dr Greider recently told the journal Science.

Dr Blasco, a former post-doctoral student in Dr Greider's laboratory, is more certain of the benefits. "It will be useful for you to know your biological age and maybe to change your lifestyle habits if you find you have short telomeres," she said.

Telomeres: a short history

* 2003 Scientists studying 20-year-old blood samples from 143 people show that telomere length is good indicator of whether someone is likely to live for 15 years or more once they reach 60.

* 2004 Women living with stress of having a sick child are found to have shorter telomeres. Other research suggests that meditation or other forms of stress reduction may lengthen telomeres.

* 2007 Study of men in Scotland shows those with the longest telomeres were half as likely to develop heart disease than those with shorter telomeres. Telomere length was as good as cholesterol levels at predicting the risk of developing cardiovascular disease.

* 2009 Short telomeres linked with inherited bone marrow disease.

* 2010 GM mice with no telomerase, an enzyme that elongates telomeres in some cells, age prematurely compared to normal mice. The ageing effects were reversed after injections of telomerase.

* 2011 Study of civil servants in the UK shows that those with few educational qualifications have shorter telomeres than those with higher educational qualifications. People with poor backgrounds are known to age faster and suffer more age-related diseases.

Vox pop: So, would you take the test?

Trevor Salmon, 53, musician

It is a brilliant breakthrough because we spend every day of our lives trying to live longer. The idea that time is finite is a very hard reality to accept. If this is accurate, then it will enable us to make preparations and refine our lives accordingly.

Samira Melloul, 28, entrepreneur

My curiosity would make me pay for it. But I would need to be convinced by the the firm's credentials. I don't like the idea that such critical DNA data would be with a company that could store it or sell it on to third parties. In the future, this type of information will become very valuable.

Narek Sarkissian, 27, engineer

I don't trust it. Life is about chance and you could die crossing the street tomorrow. What's the point of a DNA test when our true fate is out of our hands? Offering to predict these things with an element of certainty is ambitious and simply not worth my time. There are much better things I could spend that money on.

Natalie Burger, 60, retired

I wouldn't want to know when I was going to die. I'm 60 now and I keep thinking maybe I have another 15 years. But perhaps I have less than that. I don't make plans and have to accept that when my time has come, it's over. Some of this information is all too frightening and is better left alone.

A test can tell if breast cancer will recur

LONDON: Scientists have devised a new, cheap breast cancer test that can accurately predict if a tumour is likely to return after surgery, a breakthrough they say could spare women the ordeal of chemotherapy.

The test, likely to cost about £120 and expected to be available by the year end, uses a technology already available in almost all NHS labs to estimate the risk of recurrence of the most common type of the disease, called oestrogen positive (ER+) breast cancer.

At present around half of the women diagnosed with breast cancer undergo chemotherapy following their surgery to reduce the chances of the illness returning . But, scientists behind the test, called ICH4, think many don't need to have this exhausting treatment as their tumours are 'low risk' and unlikely to recur , the Daily Mail reported.

They estimate that the ICH4 test could pick out between 4,000 and 5,000 women every year in the UK alone who would not need chemotherapy, which lasts up to six months and normally causes side effects.

Five Reasons You Won’t Die

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We’ve been taught we’re just a collection of cells, and that we die when our bodies wear out. End of story. I’ve written textbooks showing how cells can be engineered into virtually all the tissues and organs of the human body. But a long list of scientific experiments suggests our belief in death is based on a false premise, that the world exists independent of us – the great observer.

A long list of scientific experiments suggests our belief in death is based on a false premise. This article provides five compelling reasons why you won’t die.

Here are five reasons you won’t die.

Reason One. You’re not an object, you’re a special being. According to biocentrism, nothing could exist without consciousness. Remember you can’t see through the bone surrounding your brain. Space and time aren’t objects, but rather the tools our mind uses to weave everything together.

“It will remain remarkable,” said Eugene Wigner, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 “in whatever way our future concepts may develop, that the very study of the external world led to the conclusion that the content of the consciousness is an ultimate reality.”

Consider the uncertainty principle, one of the most famous and important aspects of quantum mechanics. Experiments confirm it’s built into the fabric of reality, but it only makes sense from a biocentric perspective. If there’s really a world out there with particles just bouncing around, then we should be able to measure all their properties. But we can’t. Why should it matter to a particle what you decide to measure? Consider the double-slit experiment: if one “watches” a subatomic particle or a bit of light pass through slits on a barrier, it behaves like a particle and creates solid-looking hits behind the individual slits on the final barrier that measures the impacts. Like a tiny bullet, it logically passes through one or the other hole. But if the scientists do not observe the trajectory of the particle, then it exhibits the behavior of waves that allow it pass through both holes at the same time. Why does our observation change what happens? Answer: Because reality is a process that requires our consciousness.

The two-slit experiment is an example of quantum effects, but experiments involving Buckyballs and KHCO3 crystals show that observer-dependent behavior extends into the world of ordinary human-scale objects. In fact, researchers recently showed (Nature2009) that pairs of ions could be coaxed to entangle so their physical properties remained bound together even when separated by large distances, as if there was no space or time between them. Why? Because space and time aren’t hard, cold objects. They’re merely tools of our understanding.

Death doesn’t exist in a timeless, spaceless world. After the death of his old friend, Albert Einstein said “Now Besso has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us…know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” In truth, your mind transcends space and time.

Reason Two. Conservation of energy is a fundamental axiom of science. The first law of thermodynamics states that energy can’t be created or destroyed. It can only change forms. Although bodies self-destruct, the “me” feeling is just a 20-watt cloud of energy in your head. But this energy doesn’t go away at death. A few years ago scientists showed they could retroactively change something that happened in the past. Particles had to “decide” how to behave when they passed a fork in an apparatus. Later on, the experimenter could flip a switch. The results showed that what the observer decided at that point determined how the particle behaved at the fork in the past.

Think of the 20-watts of energy as simply powering a projector. Whether you flip a switch in an experiment on or off, it’s still the same battery responsible for the projection. Like in the two-slit experiment, you collapse physical reality. At death, this energy doesn’t just dissipate into the environment as the old mechanical worldview suggests. It has no reality independent of you. As Einstein’s esteemed colleague John Wheeler stated “No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.” Each person creates their own sphere of reality – we carry space and time around with us like turtles with shells. Thus, there is no absolute self-existing matrix in which energy just dissipates.

Reason Three. Although we generally reject parallel universes as fiction, there’s more than a morsel of scientific truth to this genre. A well–known aspect of quantum physics is that observations can’t be predicted absolutely. Instead, there’s a range of possible observations each with a different probability. One mainstream explanation is the‘many–worlds’ interpretation, which states that each of these possible observations corresponds to a different universe (the ‘multiverse’). There are an infinite number of universes (including our universe), which together comprise all of physical reality. Everything that can possibly happen occurs in some universe. Death doesn’t exist in any real sense in these scenarios. All possible universes exist simultaneously, regardless of what happens in any of them. Like flipping the switch in the experiment above, you’re the agent who experiences them.

Reason Four. You will live on through your children, friends, and all who you touch during your life, not only as part of them, but through the histories you collapse with every action you take. “According to quantum physics,” said theoretical physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, “the past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities.” There’s more uncertainty in bio-physical systems than anyone ever imagined. Reality isn’t fully determined until we actually investigate (like in the Schrödinger’s cat experiment). There are whole areas of history you determine during your life. When you interact with someone, you collapse more and more reality (that is, the spatio-temporal events that define your consciousness). When you’re gone, your presence will continue like a ghost puppeteer in the universes of those you know.

Reason Five. It’s not an accident that you happen to have the fortune of being alive now on the top of all infinity. Although it could be a one–in–a–jillion chance, perhaps it’s not just dumb luck, but rather must be that way. While you’ll eventually exit this reality, you, the observer, will forever continue to collapse more and more ‘nows.’ Your consciousness will always be in the present — balanced between the infinite past and the indefinite future — moving intermittently between realities along the edge of time, having new adventures and meeting new (and rejoining old) friends.

“Biocentrism” (BenBella Books) lays out Lanza’s theory of everything.

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