GoKawiilMorbid: Debunking Modern Longevity Science Saul Justin Newman MIT Press (2026)
How old can a human live to be — and for how long can they be expected to live in good health? Average lifespans have increased over the past century thanks to improved nutrition and advances in medical science. As a result, these questions have increasingly exercised demographers and researchers studying ageing. The answers matter: not just to individuals, but to societies seeking to build sustainable social systems around ageing populations.
Still working at 107: supercentenarian study probes genetics of extreme longevity
Yet there is little agreement about what the available data show. Some researchers say that gains in overall life expectancy are mostly or entirely due to reductions in mortality earlier in life, rather than more people living to grand old ages, and that there could be a limit to longevity hard-wired into human genetics. Others see exactly the opposite pattern in the data. Meanwhile, claims about the prevalence of ‘supercentenarians’ — people living to an age of 110 or more — have come under the spotlight, with many cases of extremely long-lived individuals being questioned or debunked.
Saul Newman, a longevity researcher at the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, UK, attracted attention with work1 that sought to debunk the concept of ‘blue zones’ — regions in nations such as Greece, Italy and Japan that supposedly have unusually high numbers of extremely old people. Newman’s claims prompted a furious response from some demographers.
In his book Morbid, he doubles down on the topic, arguing that all of the claims and counterclaims about maximum human lifespan rest on fragile foundations. Many celebrated cases of extreme longevity arise simply from faulty records, he says, raising broader questions about how ageing is measured and interpreted.
What first led you to question the reliability of supercentenarian records?
Curiosity, at first, sparked by a clearly flawed Nature paper sent to me by a colleague. The authors had argued that there was a hard limit to human survival2, but I found that the analysis rested on basic mathematical errors.
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What struck me was the response from researchers. Many people debated the paper’s findings, yet the scale of the errors was not recognized. That drew me into the broader question of how long humans can live.
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