Based on various stories that have popped up on HN in the last few years, there seems to be a lot of things inside us that might determine how long we live...
However, the current paradigm is to reward people who check for "significant differences/correlations", which just means that they "discover" all these non-zero correlations. Basically it is a huge waste of time and money but it works really well to generate an endless series of breathless press releases.
It required training myself in math, programming, history of the topic, and stats in addition to the normal grad school stuff (memorizing stuff for classes, data collection, etc) which amounted to about 3 years of working almost nonstop.
Turns out nobody cared, all they wanted to know is if there was a significant difference between groups. My attempt caused me health, financial, and social problems for literally an anti-reward so I would not recommend anyone try it. I also don't believe anyone would get a nobel prize for that in the current environment, they would be ignored or fought against because some holy cows would need to be sacrificed.
EDIT: As a more concrete example. Look at the pushback against Tomasetti & Vogelstein for daring to point out that there is a base rate of mutations per cell division and accumulated mutations lead to cancer, so cancers arise more often in tissues with more divisions. This is almost common sense, but people cannot handle it for some reason: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/no-cance...
The bad stuff was the usual misinterpreting correlation coefficients and p-values (this is standard, found in pretty much every paper) and that the data is messy/incomplete. I mean, sure more people should be working on figuring out the number of stem cell divisions by tissue and other nations should collect data of the same quality as SEER...
If it was just another standard "smoking/sunlight/etc causes cancer" paper with the same issues there would not have been this response. It even says so in the atlantic, people think this information undermines their public health campaigns:
>'The paper triggered a hailstorm of criticism. Some scientists chastised the methods. Why did they ignore common cancers like breast and prostate? Why did they only focus on the U.S.? Others accused the duo of undermining public health. Many personal choices, from quitting smoking to staying lean, can dramatically reduce one’s risk of cancers, but why would you bother if you read headlines saying that these diseases are “largely down to bad luck?”' https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/no-cance...
Now I am sure there is some other info in these papers that may be useful about how the nucleolus changes with age, etc but, like the OP noted, the headlines are all about "playing a role".