telomeres manifest the vagaries of fate and history, class and race, stress and trauma. How? At birth, telomeres have many “units”—the DNA base pairs of which they are constituted—and by old age, far fewer. “We start out with about ten thousand when we’re a baby, and we get down to four thousand when we die,” Elissa Epel told me. Every time a cell in our body divides, telomeres shorten; when they get too short, their host cell dies or may deteriorate and become dysfunctional. As they shrink, immune function is impaired, inflammation rises, and we fall more prone to illness.
