E=mc Squares Are Really Living It Up : Aging: A study says scientists tend to live longer than the rest of us. It seems the social graces that many of them admit they lack may not be so healthy after all.

If it were a movie, it would probably be called “Nerds: The Ultimate Revenge.”

A new study spanning nearly 70 years suggests that, all else being equal, scientists live longer than non-scientists.

The anachronistic image of socially impaired, slide-rule-toting chess masters has plagued legions of scientists, but their tendency to be less gregarious than others may give them the last laugh, says UC Riverside researcher Howard Friedman.

“The findings do bode well for attracting the brightest scholars into science,” says the Harvard-educated psychologist.

“We don’t have scientific proof yet,” he says, “but what this (study) may mean is that scientists have less stress. Perhaps they have found the right career niche for their interests and personalities.”

Until now, sociability has been naturally associated with long and healthy lives.

“There has been a great deal of speculation and some evidence to predict that sociable people should live longer,” Friedman says. “And at first, it looked like that would be the outcome here. Happily for scientists, we found just the opposite.”

According to Friedman’s study, non-scientists are 26% more likely to die at any given age than scientists. In a sample of 600 men born around 1912, Friedman’s group found that only 67% of non-scientists were still alive by age 70, compared to 72% of the scientists.

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With funding from the National Institute on Aging, Friedman tracked the lives--and deaths--of a group of California youngsters first identified as gifted in 1922. That is the year legendary Stanford University psychologist Lewis Terman began his seminal behavior study of 1,528 children in Los Angeles and San Francisco public schools.

Terman originally set out to answer the question “Are scientists different?” But, according to Friedman, Terman was never interested in the differences in their longevity.

“He wanted to see if bright people turned out to be nerdy and sickly,” Friedman says. “There was a stereotype at the turn of the century that bright kids were weird, and Terman wanted to see if they grew up to be well adjusted and successful.”

Troubled by the hunt for Communist sympathizers among American intellectuals, Terman returned to the study in the 1950s in hopes of explaining the growing friction between non-scientists--specifically politicians and lawyers--and scientists.

Terman questioned 284 of the children who had grown up to be scientists and queried another 326 who did not. (All of the subjects in the second survey were white males; very few girls or ethnic minorities became scientists in those days.)

Terman discovered two trends among the groups. First, and predictably, he found that the scientists were more interested in science than those who went on to become businessmen or lawyers. Second, the scientists--both as children and adults--rated themselves and were rated by others as less sociable than most.

Using death certificates and interviews with survivors, Friedman’s team was able to find out what happened to nearly all of Terman’s subjects. Looking at causes of death, as well as health-related behaviors, the Riverside research team found that even early predictors of longevity seemed not to apply to scientists.

In addition to Friedman, the team includes a biostatistician, epidemiologist, developmental psychologist, a pair of health psychologists and a physician.

“We know that people who live longer are not excessive drinkers or smokers. But even this seems not to be true with the scientists whose lives we studied,” says Friedman, who also found no difference in the death rates of obese scientists versus obese non-scientists.

“I can only speculate wildly on what all this means,” Friedman says. “Clearly, we need to go back again to the sample and look at marriage patterns, hobbies, everything about the way these people lived their lives.”

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There is a whole body of anecdotal history about the long and lonely lives of socially awkward scientists.

Thomas Edison, who died at 84, was no wallflower when it came to the world of inventions. But don’t look for any sweet remembrances about life with this father.

Not only was Edison too busy in the laboratory to spend time with his children or grandchildren, he also paid scant attention to either of his wives or any of the people who wanted to be his friends.

Indeed, according to his biographers, Edison was so antisocial that he considered his deafness a blessing. He said it made it easier for him to concentrate.

Albert Einstein was more outgoing and, especially around World War II, quite politically active. He adored classical music, the violin, and his first cousin, whom he married after divorcing his first wife. He died at 76.

But even he preferred the company of formulas and theorems to that of mathematicians and physicists.

While the Einsteins of today are as likely to be orbiting in space ships as they are to be bent over a microscope, the scientific personality remains somewhat aloof, say some students of behavior.

“The value of our findings about scientists’ longevity,” Friedman says, “will come from identifying what it is that makes them a breed apart and why they seem to thrive on it.”