Dr. Robert Waldinger

So we got their medical records.

We asked them about

how they thought about work and relationships and family and all that.

And it was 728 people, right?

724.

And then we expanded to spouses.

And then we expanded to children, all of whom now are mostly baby boomers.

So now it's about 2,500 people.

And we've known their whole families.

And we actually went back and talked to the original guy's parents and grandparents and

And we have these wonderful notes about what was being served for dinner in these homes in 1938.

I mean, it's just amazing.

And so what we did was we followed these people all the way through their lives with...

interviews and questionnaires and medical records.

And then eventually as new methods came along, like we started drawing blood for DNA and messenger RNA, which is so cool to me because DNA wasn't even imagined in 1938.

And we started putting people on the MRI scanner and watching how their brains lit up differently when we showed them different kinds of pictures.

Um,

We bring them into our lab and we deliberately stress them out.

And then we watch how they recover from stress as a way.

All these are ways of trying to get at this big amorphous thing we're calling well-being.