- Not to be confused with the actual Nobel prizes, the Ig Nobels recognise scientific discoveries that “make people laugh, then think”.
- We caught up with one of this year’s winners, Saul Justin Newman, a senior research fellow at the University College London Centre for Longitudinal Studies.
How did you find out about your award?
I picked up the phone after slogging through traffic and rain to a bloke from Cambridge in the UK. He told me about this prize and the first thing I thought of was the lady who collected snot off of whales and the levitating frog. I said, “absolutely I want to be in this club”.
What was the ceremony like?
The ceremony was wonderful. It’s a bit of fun in a big fancy hall. It’s like you take the most serious ceremony possible and make fun of every aspect of it.
But your work is actually incredibly serious?
- In general, the claims about how long people are living mostly don’t stack up.
- I’ve tracked down 80% of the people aged over 110 in the world (the other 20% are from countries you can’t meaningfully analyse).
- The epitome of this is blue zones, which are regions where people supposedly reach age 100 at a remarkable rate.
- They’re the subject of tons of scientific work, a popular Netflix documentary, tons of cookbooks about things like the Mediterranean diet, and so on.
What about other places?
- Eurostat keeps track of life expectancy in Sardinia, the Italian blue zone, and Ikaria in Greece.
- With the Greeks, by my estimates at least 72% of centenarians were dead, missing or essentially pension-fraud cases.
What do you think explains most of the faulty data?
- In Okinawa, the best predictor of where the centenarians are is where the halls of records were bombed by the Americans during the war.
- If the person dies, they stay on the books of some other national registry, which hasn’t confirmed their death.
- The oldest man in the world, John Tinniswood, supposedly aged 112, is from a very rough part of Liverpool.
- The easiest explanation is that someone has written down his age wrong at some point.
But most people don’t lose count of their age…
You would be amazed. Looking at the UK Biobank data, even people in mid-life routinely don’t remember how old they are, or how old they were when they had their children. There are similar stats from the US.
What does this all mean for human longevity?
- The clear way out of this is to involve physicists to develop a measure of human age that doesn’t depend on documents.
- We can then use that to build metrics that help us measure human ages.
- Longevity data are used for projections of future lifespans, and those are used to set everyone’s pension rate.
What’s your best guess about true human longevity?
- Rich people do lots of exercise, have low stress and eat well.
- I just put out a preprint analysing the last 72 years of UN data on mortality.
Do you think the Ig Nobel will get your science taken more seriously?
