FAKE CENTENARIANS, FAULTY DATA, JUNK SCIENCE, AND CONTESTED "BLUE ZONES."

DEMOGRAPHERS AT WAR

- KERRY HOWLEY

IT IS EXCEPTIONALLY hard to know how long long-lived animals endure. For the vast majority of species there are no growth rings to count, no blood tests to perform, no methods beyond marking time. The way scientists assess the longevity of wild animals is to tag them, go away, and hope to see them again.

We know albatrosses live long lives because a 38-year-old ornithologist put a ring on a bird and caught her again when he was 84.

Once, a termite queen lived in the laboratory for 21 years; no one can say whether this is typical in the wild or particular to this singular, persistent insect. How long tortoises live is unclear. We know bowhead whales live past 100 because in 2007 a whale was caught with harpoon points lodged in its shoulder bone, weapons not used in well over a century.

Our recordkeeping is more sophisticated when turned on ourselves; the average life expectancy of an Australian human male is solidly 81. In 2016, Saul Newman was a clean-shaven 31-year-old working in a sterile glass box in Canberra, Australia, part of a lab where geneticists probed the internal mysteries of wheat. Saul Newman loves plants. "Broccolini was invented in the '80s by the Sakata Seed Corporation," he once said to me. "Isn't that wonderful?" One day a friend from his Ph.D. cohort sent him a paper in Nature called "Evidence for a limit to human lifespan," thinking he might be interested in the subject. What interested Newman about this paper, as he made his way, increasingly exasperated, through pages of arguments for a maximum lifespan of about 115 years for humans, was how extraordinarily bad it was. "A horror show," he called it. "They've done everything wrong," he said to a colleague, astonished that such work could appear in a journal as prestigious as Nature. When he ran the data independently, he got a wildly different result.