Perls and other experts are still stumped as to why some people who don’t work at it manage to lead long lives. For every clean-living Lois Vaught, there’s a Jeanne Louise Calment.

Calment was a Frenchwoman who, by all accounts, smoked until a few years before her death — and only stopped then because she no longer could light her cigarettes. When she died in 1997, at the age of 122, she was the oldest person to be reliably documented.

“The lifestyles of these people are all across the board,” said S Jay Olshansky, an epidemiologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago. But, “to make it past 100, you have to have been born having already won the genetic lottery”.

In mid-December, Dutch scientists reported a key genetic link in the process — evidence that the ability to repair the kind of DNA damage that routinely occurs in our cells plays a critical role in how rapidly we age. Mice genetically designed to lack a critical DNA repair gene not only aged more quickly than normal mice but also showed the same symptoms as a 15-year-old suffering from progeria, a rare genetic disorder that ages children and shortens their lives.

The goal of the study, which appeared in Nature and two journals published by the Public Library of Science, was to examine what happens at the cellular level when we age, the authors say.

“First of all, we’re trying to understand the ageing process. Second, we’d like to help in the development of compounds to treat these patients,” said Jan HJ Hoeijmakers, a senior author of the study. But reliable anti-ageing therapies are years away, many experts agree.

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