For 79 years, this groundbreaking Harvard study has searched for the key to happiness

For close to 80 years, Harvard University researchers have studied the lives of the same group of men. Since 1938, they’ve tracked their development, documenting every two years details about their physical and emotional health, their employment, their families and their friendships.

By looking at human development over a lifespan, the early researchers hoped to find trends that would provide insight into what factors ultimately led to a good life.

The big takeaway from the decades of research and millions of dollars spent on the famous Grant Study is that, as the Beatles sang, all you need is love. It was not money or status that determined a good life. Those who were happiest and healthier reported strong interpersonal relationships, while those who were isolated had declines in mental and physical health as they aged. In November 2015, Robert Waldinger, the director of the program, shared that key finding in a widely popular Ted Talk that has been viewed close to 14 million times — there’s clearly an appetite for learning what to prioritize to have more fulfilling lives.

[Harvard researchers discovered the one thing everyone needs for happier, healthier lives]

But the program is now feeling the squeeze of a constrained funding climate, and Waldinger and his team worry that money will dry up.

Most of the budget for the longitudinal study comes from the federal government, the National Institutes of Health in particular, and every five years, Harvard has to make the case again for why the American taxpayer should foot the bill for this work.

It’s not lost on Waldinger, a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital, that to an outsider what they do might not seem like the most pressing of research compared to looking for cures for cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. And with President Drumpf suggesting cutting NIH’s budget by 19 percent, Waldinger worries that the famous study could be viewed by the cash-strapped grant-givers as dispensable.

“One of the first things to go are the long-term things that don’t pay off right away,” he said. “This is basic psychological science, it’s not always directly applicable but gives you the underpinnings. It’s one of the things that lets you understand that homosexuality is not a choice for people, these are basic developmental understandings, we understand more about alcoholism being a disease and not a crime, we learn this by following people along.”

(continues, WaPo)