I hope that age does not weaken me, and that I am still prancing about in impractical frocks and thinking unsuitable thoughts well into my nineties. I could pay about £500 for a DNA analysis to gaze hazily into my medical destiny, but, if I’m heading for Alzheimer’s and a gammy leg, I’d rather not know it.

Neither, by the bye, would I have the slightest interest in meeting someone else with the same medical predicament. Yet, this is exactly the service being offered by 23andMe, a Silicon Valley start-up that will analyse your saliva and post your genetic make-up on a secure website. The site will have social networking features that will allow people with similar genetic variations to find each other. It’s like a Facebook for the frail, which doesn’t sound the jolliest of premises. Still, Google has taken a £2 million stake in the company, and one should never make the mistake of sneering at billionaires.

Intriguingly, the service could herald the onset of genetically targeted advertising. Which is another reason not to sign up: if my DNA contains harbingers of dementia and infirmity, do I really want to be plagued today, in my prime, with advertisements for memory aids and Zimmer frames?

Would the woman in the street find science more thrilling if she were able to determine the course of future research? Rupert Sheldrake, an independent biologist and author, thinks so, according to Science and Public Affairs, the magazine of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr Sheldrake, who researches fringe topics such as telepathy, suggests that 1 per cent of the money dished out by research councils should be reserved for projects dreamt up by Joe Public.

“If we asked schoolchildren, trades unions and birdwatchers what kind of research they’d like to see, it would encourage them to think about science more deeply,” Dr Sheldrake, the author of Dogs that Know When Their Owners are Coming Home, tells me. “At the moment, there is a great disjunction between what people are interested in and what science actually does. For example, every time there’s an earthquake the newspapers are full of stories about whether animals can sense them coming. The public are really interested in it, and yet I’m the only person in the country working on it.”

If more of us helped to decide funding there would be a rise in practical, consumer-orientated research (for example, a meaty study into whether complementary medicines work) and curiosity-driven projects. The result, he predicts, would be greater public enthusiasm for science.

Dr Sheldrake is not alone in criticising the present system. Sydney Brenner, the Nobel prize-winning biologist, has suggested that 1 per cent of funding should be allocated randomly, lottery-style.

“Journalists would love these funding schemes because they would give them something to write about,” Dr Sheldrake adds helpfully. Okay, I’m in.

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