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Listen to Jane Goodall’s final — and urgent — message
Unlocking the Secrets to Living to 100
Want to enjoy a long, healthy, and happy life? Just live like a centenarian.
That’s the advice of Stacy Andersen, a behavioral neuroscientist at Boston University and co-director of the New England Centenarian Study, the largest study of centenarians and their families in the world.
The study, which has enrolled more than 3,000 centenarians over its 30-year history, has been exploring the genetic factors, lifestyle choices, and environmental influences that appear to play a role in the longevity of people who live to 100 and beyond. The hope is that by studying centenarians, researchers can find treatments, as well as identify habits and environmental factors, that could help everyone live healthier for longer.
“Our goal is not to get everyone to live to age 100. What we’re trying to understand is: How do you live to whatever age—your 70s, 80s, or 90s—in very good health?” Andersen says.
It turns out that centenarians, on average, don’t smoke, eat a varied diet, are social, and generally don’t sweat the small stuff. They typically spend more years of their life in good health, known as “healthspan.” They also tend to have a feeling of purpose and can find joy in the everyday, even in their twilight years, Andersen says.
As part of TIME's series interviewing leaders in the longevity field, we spoke to Andersen about her work with centenarians and what all of us can learn from them about aging well.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
You run the New England Centenarian Study. What is it?
The study was started in 1995 by Dr. Thomas Perls [a Boston University geriatrician]. When Dr. Perls was a fellow doing his training in geriatrics, he was assigned to two patients over the age of 100 who were living in a retirement community. He had always been taught that the older you get, the sicker you get, so he expected the patients to be confined to their rooms and to be his sickest patients—but that wasn't the case. Much to his surprise, they were two of his healthiest and most active patients. They were giving piano concerts to the community. They were out there doing things. He wondered if the two patients were just two remarkable outliers or if there was something different about people who reach these extreme ages—100 and over. So, he started the New England Centenarian Study. It has that name because it originally started in the eight towns around Boston, but over the years we've enrolled people all over the U.S., Canada, and other countries as well.
Read More: Want to Live Longer? First Find Out How Old You Really Are
To date, we’ve enrolled over 3,000 centenarians, as well as many of their siblings and offspring. Our oldest participant died at the age of 119. Her daughter lived to 101.
What we've seen with our centenarians is that the older you get, the healthier you've been, because, on average, centenarians have significantly delayed or avoided many chronic age-related illnesses. So in addition to having many extra years of life, they also have very long healthspans. And I think that's what most of us want.
What kinds of data do you collect from the study participants?
The first thing we do is get a blood sample. We're looking at many different factors in the blood that could tell us about how people age in a healthy way. We look at genetics, but then we go beyond the genes and look at other -omics data [which refers to the study of biological molecules like DNA, RNA, proteins, and metabolites]. We also collect a stool sample so that we can understand how bacteria in the gut might contribute to healthy aging, and we send participants preconfigured touchscreen tablets through which we can administer an array of cognitive function tests. We also check their blood pressure and measure their grip strength.
Then we follow up with them every year. We want to see what medical conditions they develop after we meet them. Are they still able to walk a certain distance? Are they still able to manage their medications on their own over time? We are really trying to understand their aging trajectory.
For one of our studies, we focus on what we call “cognitive superagers” [those who maintain cognitive function similar to people who are 30 years younger]. For that study, we ask people to sign up for our brain donation program so we can look at their brain tissue after they pass away and identify whether there is the protein buildup that's associated with Alzheimer's disease or frontotemporal dementia. For some of our centenarians, we’ve seen a real disconnect. They functioned very well in their daily lives, but then we look at their brain tissue and they have significant buildup of amyloid and tau [proteins associated with Alzheimer’s disease]. From those cases, we can learn a lot about resilience. We’re still trying to understand how that disconnect happens. How do they maintain such good cognitive function when they have evidence of Alzheimer's disease in their brains?
How big of a role does genetics play in centenarians’ longevity?
For the vast majority of us, genetics accounts for only about 25% [of longevity], and the rest is related to the health behaviors that we follow. Do you maintain a healthy weight? Are you eating a nutritious diet? Are you getting moderate activity every day? Those are things that can help everyone live 10 years longer.
For centenarians, there’s a much bigger genetic component. Genetics accounts for about 75% of what gets you to really extreme ages like 105 and older. We’ve learned over the years that it really isn’t one or two genes that are getting people to these extreme ages, but more like 200 genetic variants.
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We also always assumed that our centenarians wouldn't have disease variants of genes and that they must be enriched for protective factors, but it turns out that, with a couple of exceptions, they do have most of the same disease genes. This suggests even more strongly that they are enriched with protective factors, and that’s what we’re trying to learn more about, because that could help everyone. If we can understand these biological mechanisms, we could in theory come up with therapeutics that would help the general population.
Like a longevity pill?
Well, we’ve seen that centenarians have a healthier immune profile. We've seen that they have better DNA repair, and their cells seem to react differently to stress. We're trying to dig into those mechanisms and those could be translated into a pill that could replicate those same effects.
Are there environmental factors and lifestyle habits that seem to contribute to centenarians’ longevity?
Yes, genetics isn’t everything. Environmental factors are a big piece that we're trying to dive into more now. We are looking at things like sleep and leisure activities, social networks, how long people worked for and why they retired, how long people drive for and why they stopped driving. We want to understand if continuing to do rich activities over your lifetime plays a role in reaching age 100.
There are many centenarian studies all over the world, and each one takes a different lens on longevity, but I would say that across studies it really seems like centenarians have very good psychological well-being. They tend to score low in neuroticism. They don't worry too much about bad things that happen. They're able to deal with them and move on. They also score high in extraversion. They're willing to try new things. They tend to be very outgoing, which I think helps them make new social connections as their peers pass away. They're out doing things and meeting new people, and that helps their social networks. It also helps keep their brains strong.
Read More: Your Brain Reveals a Lot About Your Age
Another big piece is that there seems to be a feeling of having purpose in life—so waking up in the morning with things that you want to do. I think that's a little bit surprising to hear about people at age 100; you might think they are just sitting around doing nothing, but that's really not the case. They still have things that they want to accomplish. Maybe they're not planning 10 years out, but they're still finding joy in life.
Generally, our centenarians say that they never followed any specific diet and they didn’t go to the gym but they stayed busy and they were careful not to overeat and they ate a wide range of foods.
How about smoking and alcohol?
Smoking is very rare among our centenarians. Once in a while you'll see in the media a 105-year-old woman who's smoking a pack a day, but that’s a needle in a haystack.
In terms of alcohol, it varies. They mostly aren’t drinking excessively, but some of our centenarians do have a glass of wine a day or a shot of whatever they like every day. There's a lot of variability in the different health behaviors of our centenarians. They aren't all doing one thing.
Does gender play a role?
About 85% of our centenarians are women. But the interesting thing is, the men who live to 100 tend to be healthier. The women are better at surviving a long time with chronic diseases. The men, although there are far fewer of them who reach age 100, generally have very good physical and cognitive function. The men tend to be what we call “escapers,” where they are avoiding disease until after the age of 100.
I don't think we know yet why there’s this difference, but it's an area that we keep looking at, and it's a reason that looking at sex differences even among centenarians is really important.
Has working with centenarians changed the way you think about aging?
It has given me a very positive view of aging. Most people I know say they don't want to age or they're scared of aging, and what we hear from our centenarians is that they also were scared of aging, but then they reached age 100 and they found that they actually enjoyed it.
Read More: Here’s How Much Sleep You Need According to Your Age
I think seeing people at age 100 who are enjoying life and doing the things they want to do and who still love learning is really eye-opening. Centenarians also just have so much wisdom, and to actually speak with one is really a gift.
What’s next for the centenarian study?
Our study has shown that centenarians reach their extreme ages because they are, on average, very healthy agers. And now we're trying to delve into the biological mechanisms underlying that, as well as health behaviors and environmental factors that might help them age so well.
I think the most interesting piece of our work right now is focused on people who are really bucking the trend of aging and are just superstars of aging—centenarians who are still biking three miles a day or are still working or who are cognitive superagers. We’re trying to learn everything we can about how they are managing to do that.
She was only 16 years old when Nazi soldiers knocked on her family’s door.
Her name was Edith Eva Eger, she lived in Hungary, and she loved to dance.
She dreamed of becoming a ballerina, of getting married, of building a normal life.
But that dream shattered in an instant.
She was deported with her family to Auschwitz.
When they arrived, her mother whispered to her for the last time:
“Remember, no one can ever take away what you have in your mind.”
A few minutes later, her mother was sent to the gas chambers.
Edith survived only because Dr. Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death,” forced her to dance for him.
He gave her a piece of bread as a “reward.”
She shared it with the other prisoners.
That small act of kindness, in a place built to destroy humanity, saved her life.
She survived death marches, hunger, and abuse.
When she was liberated, she weighed barely thirty kilos.
She had lost everything — except her will to live.
Years later, she emigrated to the United States.
She married, had children, and studied psychology.
For years, she never spoke of what she had endured.
Until one day, she realized that unspoken pain is a prison.
So she decided to tell her story — transforming her suffering into healing for others.
She wrote an extraordinary book: “The Choice.”
Not a story of victimhood, but of freedom.
She used to say: “Forgiveness doesn’t excuse what happened.
It’s not about changing the past — it’s about freeing the future.”
Today, her words are taught in universities and therapy centers all over the world.
Edith Eger showed that the body can be imprisoned, but the mind cannot.
That even in hell, one can choose to remain human.
And that forgiveness — true forgiveness — doesn’t absolve those who do harm, but it liberates those who refuse to remain their captives.
My First Murder
A legendary true crime writer revisits the case that launched his lifelong obsession. An exclusive excerpt from Skip Hollandsworth’s new book, She Kills.
In the summer of 1974, I was sixteen years old, living with my family in the North Texas city of Wichita Falls. I was a straight arrow of a kid: an Eagle Scout, a member of my high school’s debate team, and a cellist in the school orchestra. I volunteered at the state mental hospital with my fellow scouts, cutting lawns and trimming hedges, and every Sunday morning I attended services at Fain Memorial Presbyterian Church, where my father was the pastor. When church members asked me what I planned to do when I grew up, I told them I would most likely become a pastor myself, delivering cheerful sermons about the joys of the Christian life.
Then, on the morning of June 22, I walked into the kitchen and glanced at the local newspaper, the Wichita Falls Record News, that my father had brought in from the yard. Spread across the front page, in heavy two-inch-high block type, was the headline “Millionaire Oilman, Wife Found Dead: Couple Fatally Shot in Home Here.”
I felt my mouth go dry. The oilman was 53-year-old Bobby Burns, a lean wildcatter who drilled wells all over Texas. His wife, Abbie, was a former fashion model in her early fifties who was described in the newspaper’s society columns as “charming” and “attractive” and “petite.”
Everyone in Wichita Falls knew the Burnses—or at least knew about them. They lived in the grandest house in the city, a split-level, five-bedroom mansion, more than nine thousand square feet in size, that they had built at the top of a hill on their twenty-acre estate when their four children were still young. The mansion included both an indoor and an outdoor swimming pool, a trophy room containing the heads of wild animals they had bagged on big game hunting safaris in Africa, and two shooting ranges in the basement.
The estate was protected by a high chain-link fence, guard dogs, and a state-of-the-art burglar alarm system. If a prowler tried to force open a window, the grounds would automatically be flooded with outdoor lights, a loud bell would begin to clang, and another alarm would alert the police station.
Apparently, all that had not been enough to keep the Burnses safe. When the police got to the mansion, they discovered the couple in their bedroom, where they slept in separate twin beds. Bobby was found in his bed wearing green pajamas. He had been shot three times—twice in the head and once through the right wrist. Abbie, wearing a blue floral gown from Neiman Marcus, was lying on her back in her bed. She had been shot once in the abdomen, just above her navel, the bullet lodging close to her spinal column. A snub-nosed .38 revolver, no doubt the murder weapon, was on the floor beside her.
At that point in my life, I had read a couple of Sherlock Holmes stories and an Agatha Christie novel. But I knew nothing about actual crime. I don’t think I knew anyone who had been arrested and taken to jail. And I certainly had never imagined that someone would execute two of Wichita Falls’ most prominent citizens in their mansion, three miles from my home.
I was both terrified and transfixed. Maybe, I told friends who gathered at my father’s church for our Sunday night youth fellowship meeting, the killer was a professional thief who had broken into the mansion, stolen Bobby and Abbie’s money and jewelry, then shot the couple so he could make a clean getaway.
Or maybe, I said, my voice rising, the killer was a professional assassin who had been hired by one of Bobby’s business rivals. “He could still be here hiding out!” I nearly shouted.
Three days later, the county’s chief medical examiner dropped a bombshell: Bobby and Abbie Burns, he announced, had not been killed by an intruder. Forensic tests and autopsies indicated that the couple had died in what the medical examiner described as an “apparent murder-suicide.” He believed that Abbie had slipped out of her bed in the middle of the night, grabbed her pistol, shot her husband, climbed back into bed, shot herself, and then bled to death.
I simply couldn’t believe it. No one could. Abbie was one of those women who seemed to have it all. She wore beautiful clothes and styled her hair in a Doris Day–like bob. She tootled around town in Bobby’s Cadillac or Mercedes or in her own Rolls-Royce, and she flew around the country in their eight-seat private jet. In addition to having a reputation as a skilled big game hunter, she was known for her artistic talent: She painted delicate miniature landscapes on antique china.
So what could have led Abbie to commit such a gruesome act? Was it because of something Bobby had done? Was it because of something Abbie herself had done?
I began my own, amateur investigation, pestering adults at my father’s church to see if they had any idea of what happened. When I went swimming that summer at the Wichita Falls Country Club with my wealthier friends, I tried to eavesdrop on the conversations that the moms were having while they lay on their lounge chairs, hoping I could pick up some rumors.
One day I decided to get a look at the mansion, which I had never seen. I asked a friend who had his own car—I hadn’t yet passed my driver’s test—to take me there. We slowly made our way up the hill and approached the estate’s front gates, which were flanked by the tusks of a huge bull elephant that Abbie had shot on one of the couple’s safaris. Suddenly I spied a security guard striding toward us.
“We’ve got to get out of here! I think he’s got a gun!” I cried. My friend slammed his foot on the gas pedal and raced back down the hill, his car banging over potholes.
As the summer wore on, I kept waiting for the police to release more information about the shootings. But they shut down their investigation. (“Nothing to indicate Burns was not murdered by his wife who then killed herself,” a detective noted in a handwritten report in July.) Nor did members of the Burns family or their close friends reveal anything publicly about what might have led to a murder-suicide. (“I never knew two nicer people,” the caretaker at the Burns estate told one Dallas newspaper reporter. “They were thoughtful and considerate and easy to work for.”) A reporter for the New York Daily News, then one of the most popular tabloids in America, even came to Wichita Falls to see if he could turn up some answers. But under the headline “One Gun Too Many,” he admitted that he, too, had come up empty. “The house on the hill,” he wrote, “was a good house for secrets.”
I went back to high school to finish my senior year, and in the fall of 1975, I headed off to Texas Christian University, in Fort Worth, to major in English literature. I was a dutiful student: I read Shakespeare and all the great American novelists, and to improve my writing skills, I worked as a sports reporter for the student newspaper. After graduation, I decided to give journalism a try. I landed jobs with The Dallas Morning News and, later, with the Dallas Times Herald, where I was mostly assigned to short, fluffy feature stories, which often included interviewing celebrities who came through town. I spoke to the pop singer Connie Francis, the famed novelist John Cheever, the young actor LeVar Burton, and an 88-year-old restaurant manager named Plennie L. Wingo, who was attempting to walk backward across the entire United States, dressed in a beautiful pinstriped suit. “Backward came he, backward like a crab,” I wrote in my opening paragraph. “Come on back, Plennie L. Wingo. Way back.”
Trying to be kind, my coworkers said I had a future writing fluff. To their credit, they didn’t laugh when I told them that what I really wanted to do was write novelistic true stories about those who had committed crimes.
I obsessed over Ann Rule’s The Stranger Beside Me, Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry’s Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders, and, of course, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. When the newspapers’ veteran police reporters went on vacation, I occasionally got the chance to cover for them, spending evenings in the police department’s press room, leafing through stacks of incident reports about car thieves, con artists, purse snatchers, pimps, forgers, and other lowlifes.
I wrote a story about three teenagers who stole a pig. I chronicled the life and times of two brothers who married two sisters and then persuaded them to join their home-burglary ring. And every now and then, I’d get to sit on a front-row bench in a courtroom and cover a murder trial, furiously taking notes as hard-boiled police detectives, the sleeves of their suit coats stretched taut around their biceps, testified in monotone voices about Dallas citizens who had shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, mutilated, poisoned, drowned, or electrocuted their victims.
Eventually I landed a coveted job at Texas Monthly, working alongside a roster of writers and editors who were renowned for producing exactly the kind of deeply reported narratives I aspired to publish. I got the chance to write more true crime: tales about love and betrayal, recrimination and revenge, malice and madness. I profiled a murderous Baptist preacher, a murderous U.S. Air Force cadet, a murderous armored car robber, and a murderous small-town mortician. I spent days interviewing a highly skilled portrait painter in Dallas who late at night picked up sex workers and cut out their eyeballs; I drank beer in West Texas with a man widely regarded as a satanic cult leader; and I followed a gang of motorcycle outlaws who were involved in a deadly highway feud with another notorious crew.
“Are you a yuppie asshole?” the leader of one of the gangs asked me.
“No sir, not me,” I replied, sweat rolling down my back.
But the lawbreakers who most intrigued me were women. Although some of them were as hardened as Texas’s greatest female felon, Bonnie Parker, the Depression-era, gunslinging partner of Clyde Barrow, almost all the others seemed to be decent, law-abiding citizens living mostly normal lives.
I met a devoted wife and mother from the Houston suburbs who overnight had turned into a desperate, knife-wielding killer. I spent time with a kindly nurse from the town of Nocona who every day would eat lunch by herself at the local Dairy Queen before heading back to the hospital to murder her patients. I sat through a murder trial in Fort Worth of a popular teenager who had decided that the only way her life would get better was if she poisoned her father. I hunted down close friends of a middle-aged Dallas woman who lived in a small apartment with her mother and who periodically dressed up as a cowboy and robbed banks.
And that’s just a short list. There were so many others who fascinated me. I studied the life of a glamorous Houston socialite who seemed to have a deep-rooted need to get rid of her husbands, visited with an elderly East Texas seamstress who 33 years earlier had made five escape attempts from prison before finally getting away for good, and went looking for a remarkable group of brazen criminals—murderers, robbers, thieves, and grifters—who were incarcerated in the 1940s at the Goree State Farm, then Texas’s sole penitentiary for women.
I also dug into the murder-suicide of Bobby and Abbie Burns, examining autopsy records and death certificates and poring over the medical examiner’s written findings as well as the police department’s 27-page investigative report about the shootings, the faded ink barely visible on the pages. I called at least a dozen Wichita Falls residents who had known Abbie and Bobby, asking if they had ever been told why Abbie did what she did. They said they were sorry, but they had no idea. I reached out to members of the Burns family, but they weren’t interested in speaking to me.
A few people did pass on one rumor—that Bobby, who was said to have had an eye for other women, had been carrying on a torrid love affair. According to the rumor, Bobby wanted to marry his mistress, but Abbie was having none of it. (“The old saying of ‘if I can’t have him nobody can,’ might have been running through her head that night,” Julie Williams Coley, a local author, wrote in her history How Did They Die?: Murders in Northern Texas 1926–1975. “Why else would Abbie kill her husband and then herself unless it was because her husband was leaving her?”)
Over the years, I picked up another new piece of gossip—that Abbie might’ve had a secret life of her own. So why, after shooting Bobby, would she decide to turn the gun on herself? According to the people I spoke to, she didn’t want to deal with the public shame of an arrest, a murder trial, and a prison sentence. As one moneyed Wichita Falls woman told me, “Abbie obviously had decided she was going to go out her way.”
But I found no evidence that any of the gossip was true. When I interviewed 88-year-old Tim Eyssen, who was Wichita County’s district attorney in 1974, he told me that police detectives had never informed him of any alleged love affairs. Nor, he said, had they ever mentioned any motive Abbie might’ve had for wanting to kill her husband.
“So the mystery of the Burnses’ killings seems destined to remain just that—a mystery?” I asked.
“I hate to say this, but I’m not sure this case will ever be resolved,” Eyssen replied.
I recently returned to Wichita Falls to poke around once more and see who might agree to be interviewed. But I had no luck. At the end of the day, I decided to make my way up Memorial Drive to take one final look at the mansion at the top of the hill. There were new owners, of course. The elephant tusks by the front gate had been taken down long ago, and there were no more guard dogs wandering the grounds.
I put my car in park. For a moment, I imagined that I could hear the gunfire coming from Abbie’s .38 revolver that night—four shots that would forever haunt a community. I couldn’t help but wonder: What was Abbie feeling right then? Was she consumed with rage? Was she overwhelmed with heartache as she reached for her gun?
I sat there for a few minutes more. It was a warm afternoon. Insects buzzed around my open front window. A light breeze began to rattle the leaves of nearby trees. Finally, I sighed, put the car into drive, and made my way back down the hill. The story that had launched my lifelong obsession, I realized, was one I might never be able to tell.
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