Most people might not have heard of the Framingham Heart Study. But the massive public-health research effort, now in its 77th year of conducting in-depth analysis of more than 15,000 people, is the source of many insights we now have into healthier aging. It inspired the first checklist for assessing heart disease risk, and our current understanding of how to reduce cardiovascular disease can be traced directly to its findings.

While the Framingham Heart Study started off solely focused on heart health, following a large subset of the inhabitants of a former mill town on the outskirts of Boston throughout their lives, it is now providing information about the brain, liver, and many other organs.

As part of TIME's series interviewing leaders in the longevity field, we spoke to epidemiolo

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