The way Burton Richter tells it, the house he and his wife had lived in for 40 years needed a fence repaired, and the repairman damaged the pool plumbing. Fixing that messed up the garden’s irrigation system. Soon afterward Dr. Richter had to climb onto the roof to repair a solar panel. “Sitting at the table that night, over a martini, my wife and I looked at each other and said, ‘Enough,’” said Dr. Richter, a retired Stanford University professor and a Nobel laureate in physics. The Richters moved into Vi at Palo Alto, a continuing care retirement community, in the summer of 2005. So did Linda Cork, who headed the comparative medicine department at Stanford. Her mother had died of dementia,...
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