I turn 49 soon so this article profiling Emma Morano's life caught my eye. She is 115 years old and has lived during 3 different centuries! She even has a causal theory for explaining her long life; a raw egg diet and no husband. A quote from the article:
"Ms. Morano has no doubts about how she made it this long: Her elixir for longevity consists of raw eggs, which she has been eating — three per day — since her teens when a doctor recommended them to counter anemia. Assuming she has been true to her word, Ms. Morano would have consumed around 100,000 eggs in her lifetime, give or take a thousand, cholesterol be damned.
She is also convinced that being single for most of her life, after an unhappy marriage that ended in 1938 following the death of an infant son, has kept her kicking. Separation was rare then, and divorce became legal in Italy only in 1970. She said she had plenty of suitors after that, but never chose another partner. “I didn’t want to be dominated by anyone,” she said.
Gerontologists agree that there is no one key to longevity. “You talk to 100 centenarians, you get 100 different stories,” said Valter D. Longo, the director of the Longevity Institute at the University of Southern California, whose studies suggest that diet is an important factor in living longer."
The article raises an interesting question of the following; take a random sample of people born in the United States in the year 1880, 1881, 1882 , 1900, 1901, 1902, ...., 1915 -- what is the probability such a person lives to age 100 and what are the predictive correlates of living that long? (gender, education, genetics, habits). How predictive are these correlates or even with really good micro data we can't really predict who will live that long. Over time for newer birth cohorts, do explanatory variables such as education become even more important predictors?