Photo: MIT AgeLab
While a Harvard geriatrics fellow, Thomas Perls was assigned a group of patients at Hebrew Rehabilitation Center in Jamaica Plain, including two people more than 100 years old. He assumed they would be easy to locate. Not so: The 102-year-old woman was playing piano on different floors each day, and the 101-year-old man, a tailor, was teaching his craft to younger patients and staff. Fascinated by their vitality, Perls launched the New England Centenarian study, now the world’s largest and most comprehensive study of centenarians and their families. What separates Perls’s research from others is his focus not on what causes diseases, but what prevents them. Now, along with Boston University’s Center for Regenerative Medicine, MIT’s Age Lab, and Tufts Food Is Medicine Institute, Greater Boston is becoming "the Silicon Valley of the octogenarian set."
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