This Wall Street Journal article says that certain sets of genes lead people to live longer. Teams of researchers are studying elderly people in Georgia, Holland, Okinawa, and New York to look for what is keeping them from succumbing to the usual foibles of old age. So far, one gene variant of FOXO3A seems to double or triple a person's odds of seeing their 100th birthday. The Scripps Research Institute is recruiting 2,000 healthy people over 80 years old to compare their genomes to those of people who died of age-related illnesses before reaching 80.