Often they feel like they will die young or have less of a future than other people.

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The genome has been deciphered and it is not the case that we can predict at a young age when people will die or even what nasty diseases they will get in old age.

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"By leaving these rats you will be condemning millions of young seabirds to die a pretty terrible death, having their brains eaten out by rats in perpetuity, " he said.

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Some 600, 000 Americans have a less severe version caused by one defective copy. (There would be more of the double-gene victims if they didn't die young.) To get its drug approved Isis will need to study 45 patients with the severe two-gene form and a few hundred with the single-gene disease.

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This proposition comes directly from economic theory, which says that people respond to the risk of dying not by shortening their planning horizon and blithely assuming they will die right on time, but by choosing to consume somewhat more when young and somewhat less when old, if they do end up living longer than expected.

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