Living past 100: This is the real secret and what scientists have gotten wrong

In 2010, welfare officials in Tokyo tried to visit Sogen Kato, a local man living in the city’s Adachi district, to congratulate him on his 111th birthday.Their records identified him as the oldest man in the city, but his family kept turning them away, saying he didn’t want visitors or had taken a trip somewhere five hours away.When police finally entered the house, they found Kato’s mummified remains lying in bed, dressed in pajamas and covered with a blanket.

He’d been dead for at least 30 years, although his family claimed he’d shut himself away to become a living Buddha.His pension kept paying, and someone withdrew 2.7 million yen, about $31,000 at the time, after officials started asking questions.“This prompted the Japanese Ministry of Justice to check in on other centenarians: not just in Tokyo but across all Japan,” writes scientist Saul Justin Newman in his new book, “Morbid: Debunking Modern Longevity Science” (MIT Press, out now).Newman investigates how unreliable age records can shape our understanding of aging, including the research behind the popular Blue Zones guides promising lessons in living longer.

He also examines anti-aging treatments sold before anyone has established that they work.Across Japan, the audit identified 234,354 people still on family registers whose whereabouts couldn’t be confirmed.All would have been at least 100 if alive.

Newman describes them as dead or missing and puts their share at more than 82% of the recorded centenarian population.“Imagine if 82% of the stars seen by the Hubble Space Telescope turned out to be dust on the lens,” he writes.“In astronomy, or any other science, this would have caused a massive scandal.

In aging science there was not even a shrug.”While researchers would later argue that Newman misread the audit and that there were only 600 people missing across Japan, the author sees a much wider problem.In Greece, he reports, at least 72% of centenarians disappeared fro...