Dr. Eric Topol

I don't know about 100, but we certainly can get to 85 plus.

And the patients who I present in the book,

particularly Lee Russo, who's 98, who's just entirely intact in every possible way.

She's kind of prototypic of the future.

We're going to see a lot more of these super-agers or welderly.

And we used to think it was tied to our genes, but it isn't.

Yeah, no, we've seen some of that.

When we did this Welderly study, Welderly was our term for super agers, they had to be over 85 and never been sick, no medications.

And so we even saw some people, like you said, Katie, 99, two packs of cigarette a day still.

I mean, but what we learned when we did whole genome sequencing,

is that these people, they didn't have anything in their DNA that was different from the elderly, the people that had the typical disease pattern.

In addition, they didn't have in their family story.

So like, for example, Lee, the patient 98, her parents died when they were in their 50s and 60s, and her brothers died.

40 years earlier than her.

So the question is, why are these people in the elderly often the last person standing in their family?

And it's not mostly genes.

It turns out it could be luck, but that's probably a very small percent.

It's probably everything that points to the immune system.

You get to 85 plus years,

when you have a resilient, intact immune system.