As you report, the research on loneliness by Steven Cole of the University of California at Los Angeles offers some clues as to why a gregarious person has a fifty percent better chance of surviving than a lonely one (“Mind and Body,” February 26, 2011). Apparently, it is all about genes. “It is not that the lonely and the gregarious are genetically different from each other,” you explain. “Rather, their genes are regulated differently according to how sociable an individual is.” Of course, this does not tell you much about why loneliness could be “bad for your health,” as you put it. It only deals with the biological intricacies involved. This reminds me of an earlier report of yours on research of loneliness (“Alone in the Crowd,” December 12, 2009). There, too, you confused the means and the end. As I wrote to you back then, Howard Bloom’s Global Brain (2000) offers some real clues. According to him, loneliness is akin to apoptosis, a string of self-destruct routines preprogrammed into nearly every living cell. The process is initiated when the cell receives signals that it is no longer needed by the larger cell community. Such signals spread to neighboring cells that perform the same function. In a human community, a lonely person is perforce not needed any longer, and his or her genes will take care of the rest all the way down to the cellular level. The intricacies are interesting, no doubt, but the underlying cause is even more so.