Follow
I would like to ask you if you could help me to gather as many data from your profiles as possible (presumably primarily from your trees), where you know the date of birth (DOB) and the date of death (DOD) of the farther/mother as well as DOB and DOD of his/her child. I believe that GENI is a good tool for this. The google sheet would perform statistics and see if there is relationship. Please share data from your profiles of the people according to this example on this sheet: [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wowFArwewWzEYDN39XwqGdDQzVY...]. Let me know if you encounter difficulties and good luck with editing! This research may come out with some good statistics!.
Why is this important? There is a hypothesis that aging is a disease. This generate questions if longevity relates to our genes that are in control of our diseases. My intent is to investigate if the age of the farther and age of the mother depends in any way on age of the child that is born. The older the farther is at the time when his child was born, the older the child may or may not get. The older the mother was at the time when her child was born, the shorter/longer the child's life span could be. Here is why.
DNA of every cell is capped by protective ends, telomeres. These ends get shorter every time the cell divides. As we get older, our organs have DNA protected by shorter and shorter caps. There is one cell type where the opposite is true. This cell is sperm cell. With age the sperm cells have longer caps. The sperm of old farther have long telomers and this gets inherited in the new embryo. Thus the new born child has longer protective ends in its DNA than child conceived from young farther. However, when the farther is old there may be also epigenetic changes to its DNA that can get also into the sperm cell so there is increasing possibility that the child can be born with genetic disease. In addition there is also hypothesis that children from older mothers may not live as long due to damage encountered to the egg. We can test these two hypotheses!