Many of the world’s “oldest people” may be far younger than the record books claim — and the man who signs off on a big share of those records holds some deeply unscientific views, argues Saul Justin Newman in The MIT Press Reader, in an essay adapted from his book Morbid: Debunking Modern Longevity Science.
Newman, an Ig Nobel Prize–winning senior research fellow at the University of Oxford Institute of Population Ageing and University College London’s Centre for Longitudinal Studies, opens with Adele Dunlap. Records listed her as 113. She said she was 104, and for nearly a decade, insisted the paperwork was off by about ten years.
Reporters and the Gerontology Research Group (GRG) waved off her objections, and GRG director Robert Young told her she was the nation’s validated oldest woman. “Adele Dunlap was a supercentenarian whether she liked it or not,” Newman writes.
Young matters because he certifies extreme-age records for Guinness World Records. “Young has validated roughly half of all extreme-age data, but his reach extends further,” Newman notes. Young helped assemble the New England Centenarian Study, the “gold standard” of U.S. centenarian research, deciding who counted as 100 from cases found by scrolling news stories and fielding unsolicited emails. The study’s authors concluded that “ascertainment bias is likely minimal” — though, Newman points out, they had no way to measure it.
Then there’s Young’s past work, which Newman says promotes a “biological superiority hypothesis,” including the idea that African Americans reach advanced ages because thick skin protects their internal organs — with “black don’t crack” offered as support.
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Shaky verification is nothing new. In 1979, Guinness listed Charlie Smith as the world’s oldest person at 137, based on a Social Security file that was later lost. Smith’s colorful life story was largely false, and his age survived glaring inconsistencies, including a 1975 claim to be 144 when he was supposedly 132. More recently, Italian “centenarian” Irma Borgoglio turned up frozen in her kitchen; her son had apparently hidden her body in a freezer and kept collecting her pension.
“Cases like this are easy to dismiss as desperate, local, and faintly absurd outliers,” Newman writes. “But the same willingness to accept implausible stories scales remarkably well.”
