The Secret to Living to 100? It’s Not Good Habits
Good genes matter more the older you get
4 min
If you want to live to your 100th birthday, healthy habits can only get you so far.
Research is making clearer the role that genes play in living to very old age. Habits like getting enough sleep, exercising and eating a healthy diet can help you stave off disease and live longer, yet when it comes to living beyond 90, genetics start to play a trump card, say researchers who study aging.
“Some people have this idea: ‘If I do everything right, diet and exercise, I can live to be 150.’ And that’s really not correct,” says Robert Young, who directs a team of researchers at the nonprofit scientific organisation Gerontology Research Group.
About 25% of your ability to live to 90 is determined by genetics, says Dr. Thomas Perls, a professor of medicine at Boston University who leads the New England Centenarian Study, which has followed centenarians and their family members since 1995. By age 100, it’s roughly 50% genetic, he estimates, and by around 106, it’s 75%.
Knowing what enables some people to live very long lives has consequences for the rest of us. Ongoing research into very old agemay help provide insight that could eventually be used to develop drugs or identify lifestyle changes to help people live healthier for longer, says Dr. James Kirkland, president of the American Federation for Aging Research.
Who makes it to 100
Centenarians make up a growing share of the U.S. population. There are about 109,000 centenarians living in the country in 2023, according to Census Bureau projections, up from about 65,000 10 years ago, thanks in part to decades of advances in medicine and public health.
Despite a decline in life expectancy, which dropped to 76.4 in 2021, Perls estimates that roughly 20% of the population has the genetic makeup that could get them to 100 if they also make consistent healthy choices.
Not only do centenarians live longer, but data suggest they manage to avoid or delay age-related diseases like cancer, dementia and cardiovascular disease longer than the general population. Among the New England Centenarian Study participants, 15% are “escapers,” or people with no demonstrable disease at the age of 100; some 43% are “delayers,” those who didn’t develop age-related disease until age 80 or after.
Chuck Ullman, who is 97 and lives in a retirement community in Thousand Oaks, Calif., says he is free of health problems—aside from a sore right shoulder from a recent electric biking accident—and has no desire to live to a particular age. He hopes to live as long as he feels good and can do the things he loves, such as woodworking, attending political discussion groups and getting dinner with some of his many friends.
“There are 350 residents here, and I have 350 friends,” Ullman says of his community. He also spends time with Betty, his wife of 77 years. “My objective is to enjoy each and every day that comes along.”
Genes that matter
Researchers have identified some genes and combinations of them that are associated with longevity, such as the presence of a variant of what’s known as the apolipoprotein E gene called e2, a trait thought to help protect against Alzheimer’s. They emphasize each trait is a small piece in a large, complicated puzzle, which can factor in socioeconomic status, race and ethnicity, and climate.
Living past 100 requires a combination of many genetic variants, each with a relatively modest effect, says Perls of the New England Centenarian Study.
Gene variants that offer protective qualities, such as repairing DNA damage, are especially beneficial, he says.
People who are curious about how long they might live should start by looking at their family histories. Your relatives’ lifespans are one of the strongest predictors of longevity, says Perls. Ullman, the 97-year-old, says his mother lived to 90.
If multiple members of your family have lived into very advanced age, “you’ve potentially won a much greater chance of having purchased the right lottery ticket,” says Perls.
Good habits
Neurologist Dr. Claudia Kawas has been tracking the habits of the “oldest old,” those older than 90, in Southern California since 2003, as part of a study at the University of California, Irvine. She and a team of researchers have found links between longevity and even short amounts of exercise, social activities such as going to church, and modest caffeine and alcohol intake.
“Super-agers,” or people over the age of 80 whose cognitive abilities are on par with those 20 to 30 years younger, reported having more warm, trusting, high-quality relationships with other people than cognitively normal participants, investigators at Northwestern University found.
“Keeping in good relationships could be one key to health span,” says Amanda Cook Maher, a neuropsychologist at the University of Michigan and lead author of the study.
Your outlook also matters. Harvard researchers identified a link between optimism and longer lifespans in women across racial and ethnic groups. Among the study participants, the 25% who were the most optimistic had a greater likelihood of living beyond 90 years than the least-optimistic 25%, according to the 2022 study published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.
Jeanne Case, 100, says she has taken a glass-half-full approach to life.
She plans to outlive her colon and skin cancers and keep enjoying swing music and Mexican food as long as she feels physically and mentally well.
A day in her life can include walking a mile, conversing with her writing group or noshing on fish tacos with friends. The Irvine, Calif., resident has always exercised but also enjoys indulgences like cheesecake and lemon bars.
“I try not to let stress bother me,” she says.
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OpenAI has shelved the planned launch of GPT-6.1 Astra after internal tests raised concerns about deception and agents acting beyond user authorization, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company says it will investigate the issues and strengthen safety measures before releasing future models.
4 min
OpenAI says it is scrapping the release of its next-generation AI model over safety concerns that researchers raised during internal testing, in one of the clearest signs so far that agent misbehavior could stymie the industry’s rapid progression.
The move follows a summer punctuated by reports of artificial-intelligence systems industrywide going rogue, and marks a rare case of a major AI developer ditching a new release because of safety concerns.
The company had planned to launch the model, known as GPT-6.1 Astra, in the coming days or weeks, aiming for an October debut. The model was more capable than the company’s previous models in completing challenging tasks from end-to-end without human assistance, as well as writing.
The company instead will focus on improving the safety of future models, which it expects to be even more capable.
Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, said in an interview that GPT-6.1 Astra regressed in two areas. Compared with its predecessor, GPT-6 Astra, the model performed poorly on tests measuring alignment, or how well the model adheres to what humans would like it to do. Specifically, GPT-6.1 Astra showed higher levels of deception: It wasn’t always honest about telling users of the actions it did or didn’t take.
Another issue was what OpenAI calls “scope authorization,” meaning that GPT-6.1 Astra would push ahead on a task without asking the user for permission, and would at times reach for external tools and services even if it might be unsafe.
“For anything regarding safety and alignment, there’s a trade off,” Jain said. “You really do need to find what’s the right line between staying within scope, but also avoiding laziness in terms of how the model actually pursues tasks even when it hits friction.”
While GPT-6.1 Astra improved in areas such as “model laziness,” Jain said it didn’t quite meet OpenAI’s bar for safety and alignment, so the company decided not to launch the model publicly.
The announcement comes one day ahead of OpenAI’s annual developer conference in San Francisco. In the past, OpenAI has used the conference as an opportunity to launch new models and services that reduce costs for software developers—a segment the ChatGPT-maker competes with rival AI company Anthropic to win over.
In recent weeks, OpenAI and Anthropic have called on industry partners to slow down the development of cutting-edge AI models and invest in safety standards, noting they will temper the pace of their own internal AI progress.
OpenAI says it is working to investigate a range of agent security incidents that it has discovered in recent months, and address the safety issues underneath them. As part of the work, the company has implemented a new monitoring system to catch AI-agent misbehavior more quickly, and started requiring engineers to use stronger security guardrails for testing its AI systems.
Earlier this summer hundreds of OpenAI’s internal agents, which were tasked with completing a cybersecurity test, ended up hacking into the AI company Hugging Face. Since then, high-profile organizations such as the Australian government and United Nations discovered that OpenAI’s agents used similar, but less extensive, techniques to gain access to their websites.
Many of the publicly known agent-security incidents involved OpenAI’s internal AI models that were never slated for public release.
Last week, OpenAI said it paused training on its most capable AI models after an AI agent slipped through a gap in the company’s internet restrictions to query a public chatbot. The company said its new monitoring systems flagged the incident within 15 minutes, and training on these models remains paused.
GPT-6.1 Astra isn’t one of those models, but a different case, the company said.
“We want to make sure our model development is safe no matter whether that’s in the company, or when we ship it to users,” Jain said. “But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment.”
While the company decided not to ship GPT-6.1 Astra, it hopes to use the same base model to do additional reinforcement learning runs, and create future generations of its GPT-6 models.
OpenAI plans to conduct several deep dives to identify the root cause of the problems identified in GPT-6.1 Astra, Jain said. The work includes ensuring that OpenAI’s reinforcement learning environments are rewarding the right type of behavior, Jain added, though she noted the company would investigate all stages of model development.
AI companies have begun to draw scrutiny from policymakers and public officials, who are paying attention to the rapid development of the technology. Later this week, a Senate subcommittee is holding a hearing with third party AI researchers titled, “Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks.”
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, a Republican, sued OpenAI in June, claiming that the company and Chief Executive Sam Altman knowingly released an unsafe product and ignored warnings that it could harm users.
In a motion for temporary injunction filed Monday, Uthmeier sought to prevent OpenAI from developing new AI models without third-party approved safeguards, stop ChatGPT from soliciting user engagement and limit the company’s ability to advertise ChatGPT as safe.
Tech companies claim they “cannot stop barreling forward with their potentially civilization-ending endeavors unless they are forced to do so by the government,” Uthmeier said in the filing. “The Florida Attorney General is answering your cry for help.”
An OpenAI spokeswoman said that people want to know AI is being developed safely, “and that starts with what companies like ours do ourselves.”
“Governments have an important role to play in setting robust safety standards for AI, and we’re committed to working with Florida and other states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry—not just one company,” she said.
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