Uri Alon was long puzzled by a textbook statistic: longevity, the thinking went, was about 20 percent in our genes.
“That makes you think what’s the rest of the 80 percent: Is it the lifestyle? Why should we study genes for lifespan if it’s not that important? It kind of bothered me,” said Alon, a physicist-turned-systems biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.
