© ISTOCKPHOTO.COM/FIREHORSE
In 2005, Steve Cole began to peer inside the cells of lonely people, training his sights on the activity of their genomes. Cole, a psychologist turned molecular biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, was interested in how psychological stressors such as chronic social isolation could be bad for our health, increasing our susceptibility to certain diseases. Research had already implicated stress hormones, which are produced at higher-than-average levels in people who feel lonely for long stretches. But Cole wanted to know what was going in the genes, and not just one or two. He suspected that the expression of large collections of genes might be disrupted in people who consistently reported feeling isolated. “I had an abiding mistrust of one-gene answers because genes ...
