Madeleine Finlay speaks to Dr Saul Newman, an interdisciplinary researcher at University College London and the University of Oxford who recently won an Ig Nobel Prize – awarded to scientific research that “first makes people laugh and then makes them think” – for his work showing that many claims about people living extraordinarily long lives come from places with short lifespans, no birth certificates, and where administrative errors and pension fraud are rampant. He tells Madeleine what happened when he set out to find the world’s centenarians, and how his work has been received by the longevity research community.
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