Great expectations

摘要

On any weekday morning, you might catch Irving Kahn heading into his office in Manhattan, where he works as an investor and financial analyst - seemingly unremarkable, except for the fact that he has been in the business more or less continuously since 1928.The 106-year-old Kahn is one of many who have managed to live well into their eleventh decade with mental faculties intact and in surprisingly good health - and researchers into ageing have taken notice. Thomas Perls, a gerontologist at Boston University in Massachusetts and director of the New England Centenarian study, recalls an early encounter with two centenarians that challenged his expectation that the remarkably old would be remarkably unhealthy. While he was train-