An Australian demographer bagged a prestigious Ig Nobel prize for his work debunking longevity ‘blue zones’.
The world’s – nay, the universe’s – brightest minds gathered at MIT last week to bestow those most illustrious of scientific awards: the Ig Nobel prizes.
Presented by the Annals of Improbable Research, the awards night honours studies that “make people laugh, then think” (but more importantly, laugh).
This year’s winners included a 1960 paper on whether pigeons can guide missiles*, a 2024 study on whether hair tends to swirl in the same direction in the northern hemisphere as it does in the southern hemisphere** and a 1941 experiment that involved exploding a paper bag next to a cat standing on a cow***.
The demography prize went to Australian researcher Dr Saul Justin Newman for his “detective work to discover that many of the people famous for having the longest lives lived in places that had lousy birth-and-death recordkeeping”.
Over the last decade, Dr Newman tracked down 80% of the world’s supercentenarians – i.e. people aged 110 or older – and found that almost none have a birth certificate, and some had multiple recorded birth dates.
He has also found that that so-called “blue zones” like Okinawa and Sardinia, where people reach 100 at a remarkable rate, are also hotbeds for pension fraud.
“There was a Japanese government review in 2010, which found that 82% of the people aged over 100 in Japan turned out to be dead,” Dr Newman wrote in The Conversation.
“The secret to living to 110 was: don’t register your death.”
And now for a poetry break (Dr Newman delivered his Ig Nobel acceptance speech in the form of verse).
I was working away in my little lab, undisturbed by bunkum and woo,
When I was told the way not to get old was the blue zone’s lifestyle breakthrough.
At the stroke of a pen, they had sold medicine and shown how geriatrics keep breathing.
Long-living, they said in the abstract I read, was the secret of heavy inbreeding.
And when that didn’t sell, they thought grandly well ‘we shall play out the long game in sales’
And went searching about for a secret to tout as a way to outlive all the whales,
But 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.
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.
The 2024 Nobel Prizes won’t be announced until next month, but who cares.
*They can, but electronic guidance systems are cheaper and do less poo.
**It does not.
***Putting a scared cat on top of a scared cow did not make it produce more milk.
Send your longevity pointers to penny@medicalrepublic.com.au.
