Arle Bach settles in his chair in the Department of Hygiene at Harvard Medical School.

He nervously taps his fingers on a pile of Rorschock tests and blank questionnaires.

Dr. Bach is about to take the biggest gamble of his career. He's launching a new study and

research subject number one is due any minute.

It's 1938. Scientists have spent lots of time figuring out what makes people sick.

Bach wants to know what makes them well. What are the forces and habits the conditions and attitudes that bend the arc of people's lives.

What makes them live longer feel better succeed in the world?

So he's put together a new kind of study with a large team of researchers.

They call it the grant study after the retail

tycoon who agreed to fund it. The work will go on as long as the subjects are

alive and unless Bach discovers the fountain of youth, he will never see the results.

A young man enters, makes his way to the chair, and the questioning begins.

And it continues, year after year, decade after decade, and not just interviews, but social and medical histories, details of major organ functions, heart rate, lipid count, handwriting samples, favorite brand of cigarette, how they learned

about sex, anything that might affect their well-being.

The annual or biennial questions said every one or two years also included essay type

questions which work pretty well for Harvard men who have trouble stopping

talking. Psychiatrist George Valence takes over in 1972.

By then, one of the subjects John Kennedy has been elected presidents

and then killed by an assassin's bullet. Another Ben Bradley is

executive editor of the Washington Post. Twenty have had severe psychiatric illnesses.

Studies like this are exceedingly rare. Almost all projects of this kind

fall apart within a decade. Robert Waldinger, a psychiatrist in Zen priest,

...