Something Is Very Wrong with Modern Longevity Science

Jiroemon Kimura, who is on record as the world’s oldest man, died at the reported age of a hundred and sixteen, in 2013. His passing spawned a slew of articles about the secret to extreme longevity. (Apparently, it’s small meals.) Kimura is said to have been born in a fishing village in Kyoto Prefecture, Japan, in April or March of 1897. Strangely, he is the only one of his five siblings to have multiple graduation records; he seems to have completed elementary school in 1907, or 1909, or 1911. He supposedly married his wife on three different dates, and at some point he not only adopted his wife’s surname but also changed his first name. (He was born Kinjiro Miyake.) Demographers who attempted to validate his age wrote that their investigation uncovered irregularities and inconsistencies. And yet they concluded that “no critical discordances were discovered.” The word “critical” was doing a lot of work.Cases such as Kimura’s—and some that inspire even more skepticism—fill the pages of “Morbid: Debunking Modern Longevity Science” (M.I.T. Press), a lively and sometimes conspiratorial new book by the Oxford researcher Saul Justin Newman. Newman won the satirical Ig Nobel Prize, in 2024, for demonstrating that many of the world’s oldest living people may actually be dead. In “Morbid,” he argues that dubious age claims are not isolated—blemishes on the record of, say, Jiroemon Kimura or the famed elder Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment—but, rather, a systemic problem infecting longevity studies. “It is pretty hard to publish a scientific case report about a grandma reaching 88 years old, but if she manages 122 you might even squeeze a book out of it,” Newman writes. An exceptionally long life, in Newman’s telling, is not necessarily a function of good genes, good behaviors, or good luck. It’s evidence of bad record-keeping. The world’s oldest people, he quips, have “birth certificate allergies.”In accordance with Newman’s theory, many long-lived people are hardly paragons of healthy choices. Christian Mortensen, who held the record for the world’s oldest man before Kimura, smoked for nearly a century.

Juan Vicente Pérez—who was born in rural Venezuela, had no official papers until his fifties, and seemingly died at a hundred and fourteen—drank aguardiente every day. The Guinness Book of Records once credited Carrie White, who was given a diagnosis of “post-typhoid psychosis” in her thirties, with being the longest-lived person—until it learned of a clerical error at the psychiatric institution where she spent more than seven decades of her life. “Where are all the athletes?” Newman wonders. “The aerobically svelte, annoyingly pious, scare-you-with-their-abs types? Dead.” According to Newman, the reason that supercentenarians—people who live past a hundred and ten—frequently have unhealthy habits is that they aren’t supercentenarians at all.In a useful thought experiment, Newman shows how small errors in recorded age can compound to undermine aging research. Suppose that a hundred forty-year-olds fake their ages so that on official documents they’re listed as fifty. (The U.S. Census Bureau has said that millions of Americans misrepresented their age in the most recent census.) In a country that contains a hundred thousand fifty-year-olds, these “young fakers” would account for only 0.1 per cent of the population. No big deal. But because the faux fifty-year-olds are far less likely to die than real fifty-year-olds—after age thirty, our risk of death doubles roughly every eight years—they will come to make up a larger and larger share of their purported age group. At “sixty-six,” they represent 0.4 per cent of their cohort; at “eighty,” three per cent. At “a hundred and five,” they compose virtually the entire population.This is a problem for longevity science, and also for public policy. All sorts of profound decisions depend on how long we’re expected to live: the amount we pay into both Medicare and Social Security and the rate at which we’re paid back, the cost of insurance, the funding that’s allocated to various medical specialties and facilities, the amount of infrastructure that’s built for seniors. Unfortunately, such decisions are not always sound. In 2010, on Respect for the Aged Day, Japanese officials sought out a Tokyo man named Sogen Kato to congratulate him on living to a hundred and eleven.

Instead, they found a mummified corpse in his bedroom. Kato had been dead for three decades, and his family had fraudulently collected more than a hundred thousand dollars in pension money. A government investigation later revealed that hundreds of thousands of “living” residents of Japan had in fact gone missing or died, including eighty per cent of Japanese centenarians. During the fiscal belt-tightening of the Great Recession, Greece discovered that two hundred thousand people—about two per cent of the population—were engaged in pension fraud. Most of the country’s supposed centenarians were a product of this deception, a government minister said; nearly three-quarters of them vanished in a subsequent census, conducted in 2011.In the United States, centenarians are less common in generations for which birth certificates are widely available. But even government documents can deceive. The Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services has warned that people can easily obtain fakes; in 2010, Puerto Rico invalidated all its existing birth certificates, citing rampant fraud and identity theft. One study found that, in the middle of the twentieth century, more than a quarter of Americans had ages listed on census documents that were inconsistent with those on their death certificates. In some demographic groups, as many as two-thirds of the population had discrepancies. Some were large enough to classify individuals in an entirely different age bracket.It’s jarring to think that our age—unlike our height or weight—can’t be precisely measured. One can count the rings on a tree to calculate how many years it was alive, but there’s no equivalent marker in humans. Every so often, in the hospital where I work, I notice that a patient has a listed age of more than a hundred and twenty. This is disorienting until I realize that the patient may have come into the hospital with no I.D. and no known contacts, and that they might be suffering from a condition—dementia, schizophrenia—that makes it hard for them to remember who they are, let alone how old. In such cases, the hospital’s computer system defaults to a birth year of 1900. Recently, tech companies have increasingly claimed that various products can reveal a person’s “biological age,” and scientists have made real progress toward developing “epigenetic clocks,” which analyze patterns in DNA to estimate the age of a person or an individual organ.

But, so far, these approaches remain approximations, and they are less reliable in the very old.If Newman is correct that many of the oldest people are younger than we think, then our conclusions about them—and about the places that produce them—must be unreliable. His theory appears to explain some counterintuitive findings. An unusual number of centenarians seem to hail from low-income areas. The French Republic’s overseas départements of Guadeloupe and Martinique, which have some of its highest rates of poverty, also have France’s highest concentration of hundred-and-ten-year-olds. Newman’s own research suggests that London’s impoverished Tower Hamlets neighborhood has more hundred-and-five-year-olds than the rest of England combined.Newman aims his most pointed criticisms at so-called blue zones, places that are credited with producing extraordinary longevity. The term was introduced in a 2004 paper in which researchers tried to figure out why so many Sardinians lived past a hundred. The research team, led by a respected demographer named Michel Poulain, interviewed residents, checked documents, and recorded in blue ink on a map the places where centenarians lived. The blue clustered in a mountainous region in the middle of the island, leading the investigators to speculate about potential longevity-boosting factors, including the area’s climate and its inhabitants’ diet, life style, and high rate of inbreeding. The following year, a journalist named Dan Buettner published a hugely popular National Geographic cover story that introduced more longevity hot spots, including the Japanese prefecture of Okinawa, and Loma Linda, California.Buettner trademarked Blue Zones and partnered with Poulain. He went on to write best-selling books, offer cooking classes, charge substantial speaking fees, and found a company that made millions of dollars by issuing municipalities Blue Zone stamps of approval. The aggressive commercialization eventually led to a rupture with Poulain. (According to Science magazine, the researcher ended the partnership after Chanel released a skin-care product called Blue Serum, which was marketed as anti-aging because it included materials from blue zones, and Buettner wanted to sue the luxury label for its use of the term.) Buettner also admitted that he originally included Loma Linda because his editor wanted to identify a blue zone in the U.S., and that he “never bothered to delist it.”The case of Okinawa, a group of relatively poor islands in the south of Japan, is instructive.

Among Japanese prefectures, Okinawa ranks first in consumption of KFC and last in consumption of seafood, sweet potatoes, and leafy greens—its residents have Japan’s highest average body-mass index. More than a third of Okinawan men smoke. Although some books about blue zones encourage people to drink two glasses of red wine a day, “preferably Sardinian Cannonau”—a recommendation plainly at odds with current public-health advice—Okinawans like beer. If we want to live a long time, should we do as the Okinawans do?Probably not. In 2010, Okinawa reportedly had twice as many centenarians per capita as the rest of the country. But, as Poulain himself has pointed out, Okinawa was the site of a devastating American bombing campaign during the Second World War; much of its infrastructure and essentially all its civil records were destroyed. U.S. authorities reconstructed the civil registry by asking survivors to report their age, a process complicated by language barriers and a traditional Japanese calendar that differed from the Gregorian. The country’s postwar welfare system distributed some benefits based on age, and many Okinawans requested that their records be updated. There is a strong correlation between the number of requests made in a village and the supposed life span of its residents.Our tendency to fetishize faraway lands, trying to unearth their secrets to slow aging, can seem strange when one considers that wealthy Americans already live into their eighties and nineties. Scientists have reliable data for octogenarians and nonagenarians—one research project, the Harvard Study of Adult Development, has been running since 1938—and the lessons are clear enough. The things that help us live longer are things that pretty much everyone wants: money, education, safety, clean air and water, community. Of course, these things are unevenly distributed, and the consequences of that are readily apparent. Research led by the economist Raj Chetty has found that the highest-earning Americans live more than a decade longer than those in the bottom one per cent. And the gap has been widening. Between 2001 and 2014, life expectancy among the top five per cent of earners increased by nearly three years; in the bottom five per cent, it essentially stagnated.One hardly needs a list of blue zones to think of commonsense ways to improve life span.