Peter R. Rekus The Patriot-News

WHEN William Sunderman turned 100 he was named by the United States Congress as the oldest person in the country still at work. He was putting in an eight-hour day editing articles for a medical journal. For a break he liked to take a turn on an exercise bicycle.

Congress was not just giving a nod to a remarkable American. It was hoping that Dr Sunderman's enthusiasm for work would eventually be matched by thousands, even millions, of elderly Americans. Perhaps not all could be expected to be slogging away until senility took hold, but working beyond customary retirement age would come to be regarded as normal. One American in seven is over 65, a proportion that by 2030 is likely to rise to one in four. Governments like oldies to keep on working, partly because they are less likely to seek welfare. And pensions do not always keep up with rising living costs. But a gain for employers is that oldies often offer special skills and experience. Many are happy to be retrained, and there is less turnover than among younger staff.

They are also likely to live longer, Dr Sunderman said. He agreed with advice on long life offered by other centenarians, such as a sensible diet, absence of stress, and a happy home life. “But though no easy answers are to be found, I am convinced that one of the most important items for longevity is the maintenance of a daily work schedule.” He spoke of friends who had retired to Florida. To begin with, he said, they played golf regularly and had a drink before dinner. Eventually they played golf less and started to drink at lunchtime. “Then they forget about golf, become alcoholics and die.” Dr Sunderman said he personally had too many interests to retire. “I want to live.” He agreed he was luckier than most. But better to get a job at Wal-Mart or McDonald's, which employ many older people, than stay at home doing nothing.

Perhaps, but some would say that working in a dull job is just another way of being bored to death. Despite the growing number of centenarians (about 50,000 in America at present, expected to rise to 96,000 by 2005) it has to be said that accounts of Methuselahs who not only reach an improbable age but keep their wits about them remain rare. There was something special about Dr Sunderman.

The pioneer

A list of William Sunderman's accomplishments in one reference book takes up three columns. Where is the item that he will be remembered by? What about the Sunderman Sugar Tube? This is a tool for treating diabetics, measuring glucose in the blood. Dr Sunderman pioneered the use of insulin in the United States to treat diabetes. Then there is the Manhattan Project, the name given to America's development of the atomic bomb during the second world war. Dr Sunderman was the director of one of the teams watching over the health of the atomic scientists and developed an antidote for a form of metal poisoning, first trying it out on himself. After the war he was a medical consultant for America's space programme.

For many years he was a teacher: he lists positions held at nine medical schools. In 1971 he founded a journal called Annals of Clinical and Laboratory Science, which he was helping to edit up to a few weeks before his death. He wrote about 40 books and some 300 scientific papers. There seemed to be nothing that did not interest him. “It helps to have innate curiosity,” he said. Dr Sunderman liked to quote Voltaire's aphorism, “How infinitesimal is the importance of anything I do, but how infinitely important it is that I should do it.”

The picture emerges of a man whose life mirrored medical and scientific progress over many decades. When William Sunderman was born in 1898 aspirin had just been discovered. When he graduated from Pennsylvania University's medical school in 1923 the first adhesive bandages were being marketed (and were unpopular). When he died last week the possibilities of genetic engineering were being explored. Some things never changed. His three-piece suits were reassuringly old-fashioned. The heavens, he observed, remained agreeably unchanged: he saw Halley's comet when it passed over Pennsylvania in 1910 and again in 1986, when he was in New Zealand doing research.

He went down with tuberculosis in 1937, often a killer disease before antibiotics provided a cure. He survived, he said, helped by music. He had been given a violin when he was five. Unlike many children, he learnt to play it and went on playing all through his life. In recent years most summers he took his 17th-century violin, made by Antonio Stradivari, to Germany and played with a professional group. On his 100th birthday he gave a recital at his former college in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Music, he said, helped to balance his life. He enjoyed the “quest for knowledge and the triumphs and disappointments of research” but he looked forward at the end of his working day to losing himself in chamber music.

Many doctors, he pointed out, make music. There are any number of amateur orchestras in America and Europe composed of medical people. Harmony, Dr Sunderman said, is what helps to keep people going.