At fifty, I knew almost nothing about DNA.

That was 2016. I had spent my career in finance and law, and I was running a life insurance finance company. Our whole business came down to one question: how long will this person live? The tools the industry used to answer it had barely changed in fifty years. A nurse, a needle, a cup. Blood pressure, cholesterol, a handful of lab values, and a long questionnaire about your parents.

One day I lost my patience. “There has to be a better way to predict how long people live than tests developed in the 1960s!” I said it to my team, and I meant it. I had a computer in my pocket, a car that could steer itself and free video calls to anywhere on earth. Don’t tell me there wasn’t a better way.

Why it had to exist

Life insurance runs on a simple trade. You tell the company about your health, and it prices the risk that you die early. To get a large policy, most applicants still sit through a paramedical exam: a stranger at your kitchen table, blood drawn, urine collected, then weeks of waiting while records are pulled. Plenty of people quit halfway through.

And for all that effort, the information is thin. A cholesterol reading is a snapshot of one morning. Your family history is whatever you remember of it. None of it measures the thing an insurer cares about most: how fast your body is aging.

How it started

I had no science degree. I had never read a peer-reviewed paper. So I started reading every one I could find on genetics, aging and mortality. Nights, weekends, airplanes. It was humbling. It was also the most fun I’d had in years.

Then a copy of Nature landed on my desk, open to a profile of a UCLA biostatistician named Steve Horvath. The headline called him “The Clock-Watcher.” Horvath had found that chemical tags on our DNA, called methylation marks, shift with age in a pattern so regular you can read a person’s age from them. And people whose DNA reads older than their birthday tend to get sick and die sooner.

Eureka is the right word. This was the measurement I had been looking for. Not a snapshot of one organ on one morning, but a read on how the whole body is aging, written into the DNA itself.

What happened

We built a team of scientists and data people and went to work on a practical question: could a machine-learning model read methylation data well enough to tell an underwriter what blood and urine tests tell them today? The work produced patents. I am one of the named inventors on U.S. Patent No. 11,817,214, which covers a machine-learning model trained to determine a person’s biochemical state or medical condition from DNA epigenetic data.

That work became FOXO Technologies, which I founded and took public in 2022. I left FOXO in late 2022.

In May 2026, FOXO granted my company, LongevityFP Technologies, an exclusive license to its epigenetics technology, including its patents. The goal hasn’t changed since the day I lost my patience with 1960s medicine: replace invasive blood and urine collection with a non-invasive alternative.

Who noticed

People paid attention early. In 2017, STAT and PBS NewsHour ran the story of an insurance company that wanted to analyze saliva to predict how long people would live. That was us, back when the idea sounded like science fiction to most of the industry. Since then, epigenetic clocks have moved from a handful of labs into large clinical trials and mainstream health reporting. The science caught up with the question.

What’s in it for me

Two things. The first is unfinished business. I started this. I believe in it, and I want to see it through.

The second is personal. Health has been the defining part of my life, and I live the habits I write about. When I had my own epigenetic clock measured, my biology came back about ten years younger than my birth certificate. I want everyone to be able to know that number about themselves, without a needle.

What I’m not wrong about

I believe life insurance will stop asking healthy people to bleed for a policy. A small sample of saliva can carry more information about how you are aging than a vial of blood can about your cholesterol. I could be early. I bet I am not wrong.

A simple question started all of this. It still deserves a better answer than a needle.

Sources

Jon Sabes is a named inventor on U.S. Patent No. 11,817,214 and managing member of LongevityFP Technologies, LLC, which holds an exclusive license to FOXO Technologies’ epigenetics technology.