resolved to become a doctor after watching a doctor tend to his dying father. In order to put himself through school, her husband needed to work multiple jobs but ended with a lifelong, happy career. She stated that her hope was to "help someone else reach that dream." Helen Reichert had three siblings: sister Leonore (Lee) Reichart and brothers Irving Kahn, the noted value investor, and Peter Keane, a Hollywood cinematographer and film executive, who also changed his last name from Kahn to Keane to avoid anti-Semitism. The four siblings were all centenarians. Death Helen Reichert died of natural causes on September 25, 2011, in her Park Avenue apartment in New York City at the age of 109. Olive Villaluna, her caretaker for more than 11 years, said that Reichert died "as she had wanted to, comfortably in her chair with a smile." She was survived by her two centenarian brothers, Irving and Peter, aged 105 and 101, respectively, at the time of her death, as well as many nieces and nephews. She rewrote her will under undue influence and disinherited many of her devoted family members. In her will, she bequeathed her body to research at Weill Cornell Medical College. In addition, she bequeathed a $100,000 gift to the Residential Initiative in support of Cornell's West Campus House System. The Reichert Suite in Carl Becker House is named in her honor. In lieu of flowers, she requested that donations be made to Cornell Medical College. As a subject of genetic research Because Helen Reichert and her siblings were all centenarians (her younger sister, Leonore Kahn Reichart, who was born May 25, 1903, died on February 18, 2005, at the age of 101, researchers have been studying them to see if longevity is correlated to genetics. Geneticist Nir Barzilai, a researcher who studied the biology of aging for over a decade, included the Kahn siblings and other Ashkenazi Jews in his research. He asked the pool about the details of their living habits: nutrition, alcohol consumption, smoking, physical activity, sleep, education, status, and spirituality. Barzilai and the team of researchers at Einstein's Institute for Aging Research discovered three genes common to the centenarians that may be the key to their long life. The first is a gene that increases the amount of HDL (HDL cholesterol) to two to three times higher than average, which Barzilai believes is part of the