The 34th Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony took place last Thursday at MIT. Every year since 1991, around the time the recipients of the genuine Novel Prizes are announced, the Ig Nobel Prize awards the ten achievements that "first make people laugh, and then make them think. They're meant to celebrate the imaginative and encourage more interest in the sciences.
The first award for Biology was awarded to Robert Klark Graham, for pioneering development of the Repository for Germinal Choice, a sperm bank that accepted donations only from Nobellians and Olympians. While I jokingly tell my kids they have "superior genetic potential," this type of research and belief can have serious consequences.
In 1996, Physicist Robert Matthews earned a prize for his paper "Tumbling Toast, Murphy's Law and the Fundamental Constants," which sought to explain why toast tends to fall buttered-side down.
In 2002, another physicist, Arnd Leike, earned the honor after using the law of exponential decay to explain the behavior of beer foam.
And in 2017, Marc-Antoine Fardin earned the honor for using fluid dynamics to finally answer the eternal question: "Can a cat be both a solid and a liquid?" In case you are squeamish, no blender was involved in that experiment.
While these are funny examples, they're rooted in real science. As is the focus of this article, this year's Ig Nobel Prize for Demography.
In my circles, it is becoming more common to discuss how to live past 100 — and not just how to live beyond that number ... but to do so with a high quality of life.
A popular concept around that subject is Blue Zones - areas where people seem to live longer and healthier. There's even a Netflix documentary on the subject. Notable places include Sardinia, Italy; Okinawa, Japan; and Ikaria, Greece.
Saul Justin Newman challenged that belief with his research, which found that extreme age records tend to come from areas with no birth certificates, rampant clerical errors, pension fraud ... and even short life spans.
While longevity in the zones has primarily been attributed to diet, community, and genetics, Newman found that many of these claims were based on errors - or outright fraud. Instead, these regions are actually characterized by the opposite of what you would expect ... low incomes, low literacy, high crime, and short lifespans.
To a certain extent, it makes sense. In areas where you're struggling to make ends meet ... why wouldn't you commit pension fraud? In fact, in 2010, the Japanese government realized that over 80% of the people aged over 100 were actually dead. Part of what made this possible was that America bombed the halls of records in that area during the war.
Here's an interview with Saul Justin Newman on the subject. He's tracked over 80% of the people aged over 110 worldwide. Almost none of them have a birth certificate. Only about 10% have a death certificate.
What does this mean for human longevity?
While the stories of these 110-year-olds may mostly be fake - as mentioned in my recent article - longevity is on the rise, and there are many modalities to increase your lifespan.
The goal isn't just to stay alive longer; it's to live life to its fullest for as long as possible.
There are people living to 100, and there are plenty of people living healthily into their 70s, 80s, and 90s.
We're taking steps in the right direction. Technology and medicine are both evolving quickly.
But, like with longevity data, improvements in any space need to be met with a grain of salt.
If it sounds too good to be true ... it generally is. Not always. But, generally.
