Seventeen years ago, Eric Topol, a cardiologist and founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in the La Jolla neighbourhood of San Diego, set out to discover why some people age so well, while others do not. Aged 53 at the time, Topol considered healthy ageing to be of deep scientific – and personal – interest.
He also suspected the answer was genetic. So with colleagues he spent more than six years sequencing the genomes of about 1400 people in their 80s or older with no major chronic diseases. All qualified, Topol felt, as “super agers”.
