Are the world’s oldest people really that old?

Science Weekly

The Guardian

Science

4.2 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 24 September 2024

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Madeleine Finlay speaks to Dr Saul Newman, an interdisciplinary researcher at University College London and the University of Oxford, who has just won an Ig Nobel prize – given to scientific research that ‘first makes people laugh, and then makes them think’ – for his work showing that many claims of people living extraordinarily long lives come from places with short lifespans, no birth certificates, and where clerical errors and pension fraud abound. He tells Madeleine what happened when he went looking for the world’s centenarians, and how his work has been received by the longevity research community. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/sciencepod

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0:55.7	Discover Insignis Cash.com. It's a question humanity has been asking for millennia. In fact, we on Science Weekly posed
1:10.2	it just a few months ago in a special miniseries? How can we live well for as long as possible?
1:17.0	Obvious places to look for clues are blue zones.
1:22.0	Regions of the world like Sardinia in China. look for clues are blue zones.
1:22.8	Regions of the world like Sardinia in Italy,
1:25.6	Okinawa in Japan, and Akaria in Greece,
1:28.8	where people more regularly reach 100. But do they really? By my estimate 72% of Greek centenarians were
1:39.9	pension fraud in cases in 2012. That's quite a way to achieve remarkable longevity.
1:46.2	Dr. Saul Newman is an interdisciplinary researcher at University College London and Oxford University and he's just won an
1:56.4	Ig Nobel Award, the prize for research that makes you laugh and then think.
2:01.9	For his work scrutinising longevity data. I tracked down 80% of all
2:07.9	the extremely old people in the world and mapped them to their place of birth and death.
	...

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