A Jewish journalist is retiring as a newspaper’s science editor – at the age of 98.

David Perlman, who has worked at the San Francisco Chronicle for almost 80 years, has announced he is finally calling it a day.

"I first began thinking about it a year ago and then, what the hell — it was too much fun still working, and I could still write good stories," Mr Perlman told the Poynter online news site.

"It was, I think, a couple of months ago, something like that, that I realised it's really time to stop."

As a science reporter – Mr Perlman has reported on events both on this planet – earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, dinosaur discoveries – and beyond it, chronicling the US-Russia space race, as well as shuttle and satellite launches.

He was one of the first reporters to cover what became the AIDS epidemic, writing a small piece in 1981 about men in the San Francisco area who had been affected by a disease called Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. He went on to report extensively on the crisis, forming close bonds with both patients and doctors.

“If I started my career knowing what I know [now], I’d do the same thing,” he told Poynter.

“I've been all over the world. I've been in Antarctica, the South Pole, the north slope of Alaska, China, Israel, Europe — God knows where. I've just been everywhere covering the kinds of stories that I specialise in.

“How many people get to go watch a dig in Ethiopia to uncover the remains of a prehuman called Ardipithecus...and watch paleoanthropologists digging up fossils in the desert?”