This would seem to be a relatively straightforward task: sequence the genomes of a few thousand centenarians and see which individual genes or gene variants stand out as being more prevalent among this population than in the general population. Those would be your candidate genes. But when researchers did this, examining thousands of individuals via genome-wide association studies, they came up almost empty-handed. These individuals appeared to have very little in common with one another genetically. And their longevity may be due to dumb luck after all.