September 13, 2024

LETTER 370

A Long Life, Thanks to Where You Live? Not Likely, Says Ig Nobel Winner.

By Julia Bergin

People seated in an auditorium throw paper airplanes. One person is covering their mouth, laughing.

The Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Thursday. Steven Senne/Associated Press

The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. This week's issue is written by Julia Bergin.

Five years ago, Saul Newman published what he thought was groundbreaking research about "blue zones" — places like Okinawa in Japan and Sardinia in Italy, where many people reputedly lead astonishingly lengthy and healthy lives. These areas have long inspired envy, curiosity and dietary fads. And many scientists have tried to understand how some people can live well past 100 in good health.

Dr. Newman, who was a postdoctoral researcher at the Australian National University in Canberra at the time, did not discover a secret elixir for human longevity. His conclusion, in essence, was that blue zones do not exist. In many of these places, he found, shoddy record-keeping of vital statistics like births and deaths undermined previous research suggesting that people there lived unusually long lives.

He made some headlines but found no traction in the scientific community. His paper has not been peer reviewed or published, which Dr. Newman said was for the "rather obvious reason" that it showed a substantial amount of existing demographic research to be "bunk."

"In a sign of the levels of gate-keeping that is ongoing, I am currently attempting to overcome nine peer reviewers at a public health journal," said Dr. Newman, who now works at Oxford University's Institute of Population Aging. "It's been spectacularly ignored," he added.

That may be about to change.

On Thursday, Dr. Newman was one of 10 individuals and teams awarded an Ig Nobel Prize at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, near Boston. Started in 1991 by Marc Abrahams, the editor of the magazine "Annals of Improbable Research," the Ig Nobels honor what their founder says are "achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think."

Other winners this year included a decades-old study by the American psychologist Burrhus Frederic Skinner, who died in 1990, on whether pigeons can guide missiles kamikaze-style (the U.S. Army's verdict: Yes). His daughter Julie Skinner Vargas accepted the award on his behalf on Thursday and said it was a relief his "most important contribution" to science had finally been acknowledged.

There also was a study on whether the hair on the heads of people born in the Northern Hemisphere swirls in the same direction as that of those born in the southern half of the planet. The answer: It doesn't.

The prizes — transparent boxes that were deemed "almost impossible to open" and a 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollar bank note — were awarded by Nobel Prize winners, including Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. The theme of the ceremony was Murphy's Law and included a mini-opera about the dictum, which states that anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

Award recipients took to a stage and shook hands with one of five Nobel laureates, then had the spotlight for a brief speech. If they went on too long, a child marched out and whined "I'm bored," sending the winner scurrying.

When it was Dr. Newman's turn, he emerged in a black suit covered with bright blocks from the game Tetris, along with a birthday hat and three numbered balloons. He then delivered a poem on the myths of long lives, in line with his research.

"The secrets fell over like a lover in clover when I checked the government books. The blue zones are poor, the records no more, the 100-year-olds are all crooks," he said to a packed auditorium.

"The secret, it seems, to live out your dreams and make sure you keep living, not dying, is to move where birth certificates are rare, teach your kids pension fraud and start lying."

Dr. Newman joined the ranks of more than two dozen other Australians who have won an Ig Nobel. Accolades have gone to an inventor who secured an innovation patent in 2021 for a wheel, researchers who uncovered that some beetles mate with Australian beer bottles, and a literature award for analysis of what makes legal documents unnecessarily difficult to understand.

Despite the comic vibe of the event, Dr. Newman said an Ig Nobel would make his research, which found many of the world's oldest people are not as old as they're said to be, harder to ignore.

"Often they're alive on paper and dead in reality, but the bureaucratic machine doesn't know that," Dr. Newman said.

After analyzing 80 percent of all documented supercentenarians — people who live to be 110 — throughout much of the 20th and 21st century, Dr. Newman said that he found a "deeply shocking" amount of vital statistics were false or fabricated. But, he said, international organizations, national governments and scientists have kept relying on that data.

"I discovered that the oldest man in the world had three birthdays and no birth certificate," Dr. Newman said about Jiroemon Kimura, a Japanese man who was said to be 116 when he died.

The researcher said he had an idea why these discrepancies had flown under the radar for so long. It could trigger a complete implosion in global demographic studies, he said. It also could just be a simple case of good versus bad news.

"You have a woman who's 89 and a woman who's 119 — which one of those is going to make the newspaper?" he said. "The same goes for scientific findings."

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