“I now have a much more complex view of causation,” Steve Cole told me. “If you get a disease, a whole series of things had to have gone wrong. Some of that may be related to your genes; some of that may be related to pathogen exposure. Some of it is related to hard lives—the way that can wreak wear and tear on the body and on what would otherwise be resilient tissues. It’s better to think of it as a multistep causation . . . One of the things many diseases have in common is inflammation, acting as kind of a fertilizer for the development of illness. We’ve discovered that when people feel
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