These three are some of the oldest members of a group of centenarians in Brazil who are providing scientific clues about the limits of human longevity. Participants in the DNA Longevo (Portuguese for Long-lived DNA) study are still being recruited, but scientists have already sequenced the genomes of more than 160 centenarians. Twenty participants are 'supercentenarians' ' those who reached the age of 110. Early data show that the supercentenarians did not have especially healthy diets or exercise routines or access to high-end medicine for most of their lives. The secret to their long lives might instead lie in their genomes. In a preliminary report1 published this month, researchers hypothesize that the participants' genetic diversity could have a role in their resilience. 'We know that Brazil has a highly mixed population, and that may contribute to their longevity,' says geneticist Mayana Zatz, who leads the project at the Human Genome and Stem Cell Research Center at the University of Sao Paulo....

Joan Brugge has worked for nearly 50 years as a cancer scientist, studying the earliest signs that someone might become sick. Then the Trump administration canceled her lab's funding. The administration's attacks on medicine, culture, and education'which include verbal threats and funding cuts'are about more than just budgeting and bravado. Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University and the author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. She argues that this effort is part of a larger autocratic project to maintain power. Joan Brugge: I was actually at a breast-cancer retreat. And during the coffee break, I looked at my emails to see, you know, if there's anything that I had to deal with. And I got this email from the university, and it was a real gut punch. My knees basically buckled, and I had to sit down. Brugge: I never imagined that it would be possible that funding for lifesaving research would be terminated for issues that were totally unrelated to the quality of the work or the progress that we had made in the work....

At a recent press conference announcing the publication of the government's new dietary guidelines, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declared two different military operations in the span of less than a minute: The nation would be retreating from its war on fatty steaks and whole milk, he said, and redeploying for another war, this one on added sugars. News about a third campaign arrived a few days later, when the White House shared a dark and menacing photo of Kennedy with the caption 'WE ARE ENDING THE WAR ON PROTEIN.' This appears to be what happens when someone who has spent years fighting mainstream medicine suddenly finds himself at the center of it. Like a revolutionary turned generalissimo, Kennedy has transformed the former palace into a military command center. He has promised to defeat his enemies in Big Pharma and to purge conflicts of interest from the agencies he leads, so as to end what he has referred to as a 'war on public health.' Elsewhere he has promised to withdraw from the 'war on alternative medicine,' the 'war on stem cells,' the 'war on chelating drugs,' the 'war on peptides,' the 'war on vitamins,' and the 'war on minerals.' Anything that his administration hopes to do may now be put in terms of martial conflict: Under Kennedy, policy making and saber rattling go hand in hand....

One worker joined the FBI and made a career in counterintelligence, sniffing out Chinese spies. Another developed a strong stomach around blood and guts, inspecting slaughterhouses and processing plants to make sure that the food we all eat was safe. A third worked on the Human Genome Project, bringing 'biology's equivalent of the moonshot' into everyday medicine. All were fired or left after Donald Trump's assault on the civil service, along with roughly 300,000 other federal workers. 'We want to put them in trauma,' Trump's Office of Management and Budget director famously said. 'We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.' When Franklin Foer spoke with dozens of former federal workers for our February issue, he found other layers of feeling. Yes, they were traumatized, but also relieved to talk, in detail, about work they had considered something of a mission....