Morbid: Debunking Modern Longevity Science

A darkly comedic journey into the science of aging—where ethics are irrelevant, the studies are a sales pitch, and the “world's oldest living people” all turn out to be dead.

Our morbid fascination with death and dying has created an opening for all manner of skullduggery in the science of aging—an area of study that Morbid reveals to be rife with misleading claims, mistaken assumptions, and outright chicanery. The world’s oldest man is a fake, Blue Zones are debunked, and five decades of research on human longevity is moot. What begins with a petition to exhume a famous corpse descends into amusing, if edifying, chaos as Saul Justin Newman sets out to discover what’s rotten and what’s real in the science of dying.

Unraveling an immense scientific scandal, the author finds a billionaire wrapped up in a scheme to tap the blood of Texas teenagers, the whole field of aging awash in dubious money—and himself somehow accused of spying for Russia by a CIA operative. But under the shocking absurdities lurk deadly serious questions about how people age, how long they live, and why. Newman addresses these questions with genuine curiosity and scientific rigor, contributing mathematical evidence and evolutionary insights into the mystery and mechanics of why we age and why we die.

Saul Justin Newman is an interdisciplinary senior research fellow at the University of Oxford Institute of Population Ageing and University College London’s Center for Longitudinal Studies.