A FRIEND OF MINE HAS BEEN WORKING ON THIS PROJECT FOR A WHILE: The Secret to Long Life? It May Lurk in the DNA of the Oldest Among Us. “If unusual patterns in their three billion pairs of A’s, C’s, G’s and T’s — the nucleobases that make up all genomes — can be shown to have prolonged their lives and protected their health, the logic goes, it is conceivable that a drug or gene therapy could be devised to replicate the effects in the rest of us.”