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Nonie Hickle’s hair is coal-dark. Her husband, Vincent, marvels at it. He points to it and says, “No gray!” Nonie’s a little amazed too; she thinks it’s kind of spooky. After all, she’s 91 years old.
Statistically speaking, Hickle, who lives in San Diego’s Hillcrest neighborhood, should be sick. She ought to have cardiovascular disease, cancer, or heart failure. Yet she doesn’t have any of those things. True, her hearing has been going bad over the past several years. And she has a touch, just a touch, of high blood pressure. But if you were to look at this 4'11" Korean-American nonagenarian, you wouldn’t peg her at a day over 70.
Just what makes Hickle so healthy? The answer to that question remains elusive despite one of the largest genetic studies to date of exceptionally healthy old people, carried out by Eric Topol of San Diego’s Scripps Translational Science Institute and reported today in the journal Cell.
Topol, a well-known cardiologist and digital-health proponent, launched the so-called “Wellderly” project in 2008, after becoming convinced that healthy old...