Longevity Is More Genetic than We Thought. That’s a Good Thing

In January 2026, Uri Alon, director of the Sagol Institute for Longevity Research at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and his colleagues made headlines with a new take on the problem, where they asked what happens if you remove deaths from accidents, infections, and other factors—beyond diseases of aging—from the equation. Under those conditions, they found that longevity is about 50% down to genes: far more than previously calculated. That result, which seems to imply that lifespan is less controlled by lifestyle, may help lead researchers to target specific genes and proteins with drugs and treatments that could help slow aging.A proclivity for science seems to run through Alon’s own genes. A systems biologist who trained in physics, he is a fourth-generation scientist. “Here comes the professor!” Alon’s parents joked when he was born. His mother, a physicist, taught him to love math from an early age. “She gave me lots of equations to solve, and that's, for me, the language of love,” he says. “The world was very scary for her, as a Holocaust survivor. She liked to talk about the things that are safe and beautiful, like physics.”Alon has an eclectic assortment of rese...