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if you can Are you willing to predict your death?For most of human history, the answer was a qualified Yes. In Neolithic China, seers practiced Fire Bone Surgery, Or reading bones; the ancient Greeks used the flight of birds to predict the future; Mesopotamians He even tried to plan the future in the guts of animal carcasses. We have observed the movement of stars and planets, we have observed weather patterns, and we have even observed superstitious body divinations like “children born with hair follicles” to ensure good luck and longevity in the future. By the 1700s, the art of prediction became more scientific, and Abraham de Moivre, a mathematician and probability expert, tried to calculate his own death through equations, but truly accurate predictions were still far away.
Then, in June 2021, de Moivre’s biggest wish seemed to come true: scientists discovered the first reliable measurement method for determining the length of life.Using a data set of 5,000 protein measurements from approximately 23,000 Icelanders, the researchers decoding Genetics in Reykjavík, Iceland has developed a time-to-death predictor-or, as their press release explains, “How much a person’s life is left. “This is an unusual claim, and it is accompanied by special questions about methods, ethics, and our meaning to life.
A technology that accurately predicts death is expected to subvert our perception of death. For most people, most of the time, death is still a vague consideration, haunting the shadow of our thoughts. But knowing when our lives will end, knowing the remaining days and time, eliminates the abstract comfort shield.It also allows us to look at risk in a different way; for example, we are more likely to try Unproven treatment Try to beat the odds. If the forecast is sufficiently advanced, most of us might even try to prevent what might happen or avoid the result. Science fiction often uses this possibility to tempt us.Movie like Minority reports, stimulus seekers, and Terminator Franchising uses advanced knowledge of the future to change the past, avoiding it (or not) before death and disaster occur. In fact, when healthy and capable people consider predicting death, they often think of these sci-fi possibilities—a future where death and disease are eradicated before they begin. But for people with disabilities like me, death prediction technology reminds us that we have often been considered dead better. A science of life expectancy is accompanied by a judgment of its value: More life Equal to a better or more valuable life. It is hard not to see the authority of technocrats exerting pressure on the most vulnerable groups.
Discovery this summer It was the work of researchers Kari Stefansson and Thjodbjorg Eiriksdottir who discovered that individual proteins in our DNA are associated with overall mortality—and that various causes of death still have similar “protein profiles.” Eiriksdottir claimed that they could measure these contours in a blood draw and see an hourglass in the plasma for the remaining time. Scientists refer to these mortality tracking indicators as biomarkers, and as many as 106 of them help predict all-cause (rather than disease-specific) mortality. But the breakthrough of Stefansson, Eiriksdottir and their research team lies in scale.The process they developed is called SOMAmer-based multiple proteomics detection, Which means that the team can measure thousands of proteins at once.
The results of all these measurements are not accurate dates and times.Instead, it provides medical professionals with the ability to accurately predict the highest percentage of patients most Possible death (highest risk, about 5% of the total), also the highest percentage At least May die (least risk), just a needle and a vial of blood. This may not look like a crystal ball, but it is obviously just a jumping point. The deCODE researchers plan to improve the process to make it more “useful”, and this effort is competing with other projects to become Death prediction technology, Including artificial intelligence algorithms for palliative care. The creator of this algorithm wants to use “AI cold calculation“To push the clinician’s decision and force relatives to have terrible conversations—because there is a huge difference between “I’m dying” and “I’m dying now.”
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