Book Review: Morbid by Saul Justin Newman

There is a special place in hell reserved for doctors who trade on their authority, status and medical training to monetise public fear and gullibility. Every time I scroll past a qualified physician touting elixirs that promise youthful vigour, cellulite-free thighs or gut microbiome makeovers, I want to poke their fraudulent eyes out. At best, these charlatans have chosen lining their pockets over helping others. At worst, as in the case of the Covid deniers and anti-vaxxers, they are actively dangerous – something I witnessed first-hand on hospital wards in 2021 as unvaccinated patients succumbed to the disease.

Nowhere is human hope monetised more ruthlessly by medical grifters than in the anti-ageing industry. Our inescapable fate – decrepitude and death – makes us ripe for exploitation. Who doesn’t want to pop a pill or hook themselves up to an IV infusion that, for only £99.99 a month, will magically stave off the moment you turn into your grandparents? In Morbid, debut author Saul Justin Newman, a research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Institute of Population Ageing, sets out to topple the whole, sordid house of cards. His central argument is that our fear of frailty and dying has “created an opening for all manner of skullduggery in the science of ageing”, an area of research which is rife, he argues, with “misleading claims, mistaken assumptions, and outright chicanery. The world’s oldest man is a fake, hundreds of thousands of the world’s oldest people are actually dead, and five decades of research on human longevity is moot.”

These are startling allegations, especially when made by someone whose Amazon author page reads as though it was aiming for whimsy, but written on acid. Among other things, Newman has “met a man with walrus-skull book-ends, saved two people from drowning … got run over by a moped, stuck his arm in a giant clam, got hit full in the face with a pavlova.” My unease grew at his publisher, MIT Press, describing the book as a descent “into amusing, if edifying, chaos”. I am a curmudgeon who seeks from nonfiction not chaos, but education and inspiration. MIT Press sells its author short, though – because that is exactly what this intriguing, eccentric book provides.

Take the debunking of the world’s oldest recorded man, Jiroemon Kimura, who died in Japan in 2013 aged 116 years and 54 days. Newman points out that though his age had ostensibly been verified by exhaustive examination of demographic records, Kimura had at least two documented names, two documented birthdays and three documented wives, despite having no documented divorces. The more Newman dug into individual cases of world famous “oldest” people, the more record-keeping inconsistencies he found. A pattern emerged: “An extreme longevity case would be announced, get catapulted into the global press and lauded by everyone, and disappear years later once the evidence was checked.”

More worryingly still, inaccurate ageing of the world’s oldest people appeared to exist at population level. In 2010 in Tokyo, for example, the renowned supercentenarian Sogen Kato, official age 111, was revealed to be a mummified husk in his family’s home – where he’d lain dead for at least 30 years while a relative continued to claim his pension. In the wake of the ensuing scandal, Japan’s ministry of justice investigated everyone allegedly aged over 100. More than 82% of them were discovered to be dead or “missing”. Newman found another population of dead centenarians in Greece. There, in a push to clean up public records in 2012, the government discovered that more than 9,000 people listed as being over 100 were actually dead, with many survivors only existing on paper to enable unscrupulous relatives to draw their pensions.

The islands of Okinawa (Japan) and Ikaria (Greece) happen to be two of six much-hyped “Blue Zones” – areas of outstandingly high late-life survival where centenarians, seemingly, abound. Newman brilliantly skewers Dan Buettner, an American entrepreneur who built a lucrative brand around the trademarked term, setting up the Blue Zones company and selling books, diets and lifestyles that promise the nine “secrets” of longevity. In many ways, Buettner is a precursor to the tech-bro biohackers such as Bryan Johnson, also filleted by Newman, who aims to defy death by infusing himself with his son’s plasma, injecting his penis with Botox and publicly tracking his bowel movements. Needless to say, Johnson’s website promises “personalised longevity insights” when you purchase “Biomarkers membership” for a mere $365 a year.

In an age of incessant online grifting and conspiracy theorist Robert F Kennedy as US secretary of health, Newman’s conclusions are refreshingly simple. Longevity “science” is largely built on nonsense data. So laugh at those promising you a “cure” for ageing or selling trademarked hokum. Give space to reproducible basic research. Value scientific method. Don’t smoke, eat more plants, move more. There is only one target I will not allow him. Newman must not, cannot, in any shape or form, contest the longevity of David Attenborough.