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Chicken studies wouldn't cut it with the Minnesota administration though, so Snowdon was interested when a graduate student, an ex-nun, told him about the aging sisters at her former order, living out their retirement in a convent just two hours away. He was already familiar with the advantages of studying religious groups, whose relatively uniform backgrounds mean fewer variations in lifestyle to confound the data. An order of nuns whose economic status, health care and living conditions were especially uniform would be an excellent starting place for an epidemiological study of the aging process. So he went out for a series of visits. Both Snowdon and the sisters had to overcome inhibitions--theirs at becoming research subjects, his from a Roman Catholic school background that made him uncomfortable asking personal questions of a nun. But they finally agreed that he would quiz them periodically to learn about what factors might be involved in promoting a healthy old age.
At first, the study didn't look as if it would reveal much. For one thing, Snowdon wasn't really sure what aspect of aging to focus on. For another, he had to count on the nuns to recall those aspects of their lives, including the years before entering the order, that had differed--and memory, even among the mentally competent, is notoriously unreliable. But then, after several months, he stumbled on two olive-green metal file cabinets--the personal records of all the young women who had taken their vows at the Mankato convent. "Everything changed when we discovered the archives," says Snowdon.
Because the records were relatively standardized, Snowdon could extend his study of aging far beyond the few years in late life that such studies traditionally cover. Most precious of all were the autobiographies written by each sister on her entry into the order. They were full of basic information about where the sisters were born, who their parents and siblings were, and why each one decided to join the order. With these documents, moreover, Snowdon now had an objective measure of the sisters' cognitive abilities while they were still young and in their prime. An epidemiologist could not have designed a better way to evaluate them across time. "For many years," says the National Institute's Suzman, "we had an inadequate sense of how connected late-life health, function and cognition were to early life. But in the past decade, spurred by the Nun Study, there is a growing appreciation for that connectedness."
The first results, compiled after a year of research, confirmed earlier studies suggesting that people with the most education were most independent and competent later in life (most of the sisters were teachers; many had master's degrees). And breaking with academic tradition--but establishing one of his own--Snowdon first presented his conclusions, not through a journal or a conference but directly to the nuns. Recalls Sister Rita Schwalbe, then one of the convent's administrators: "He threw us a thank-you party, and we thought that was it."