Scientists have found the secret to longevity in the super DNA of some of Earth's longest living people.

Dr. Stephen Coles is a gerontologist who teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and is also the executive director of a group of scientists devoted to slowing and ultimately reversing the aging process.

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The group called the Gerontology Research Group (GRG) studies "supercentenarians" or people aged 110 and above.

Upon interviewing several of these people, the group and Coles were shocked to find some of them led very bad lifestyles and had drunk alcoholic beverages and smoke occasionally. There were also those that led clean lives.

GRG found regardless of their lifestyle habits, the one thing they had in common was that longevity ran in their families. Instead of the length of their life depending on lifestyle choices, it is actually dependent on their DNA.

Coles did genome sequencing on supercentenarians and analyzed them against results from centenarians.

He found there is a certain limiting factor that prevents old people from growing still older, and it lies in a single gene.

This gene is present in all people, but it's the variant of the gene that's crucial for increased life expectancy.

The gene itself hasn't yet been made public by Coles. He comments that drug companies have been after him -- hounding him for this secret -- and that he has competitors on the east coast that might try to monetize the concept in some way.

The one thing the group released came from Natalie Coles, co-author of the study and wife of Stephen.

She said many companies see their work as extending the life expectancy and relate it to overpopulation and resources. She says it goes deeper than that, however.

"It is about finding the clock within the human body and finding what mechanisms turn that clock on and off," she said.

Cancer is an acceleration of that clock, Natalie explains. "So the question," she said, "is how can we manipulate the clock within the body to speed things up or slow things down, to stop cancer, stop Alzheimer's."

Their research opens up a world of possibilities on the topic and will be out soon.

TagsLongevity Gene, Gerontology Research Group, GRG