Interview with Saul Newman

Saul Newman, a senior research fellow at the University of Oxford and UCL, has published across a broad range of fields, including plant science, demography and climate change. His work debunking much existing research about extreme ageing won him an Ig Nobel Prize, which recognises scientific discoveries that “make people laugh, then think”.

Where and when were you born?
This sounds like you’ll ask me my mother’s maiden name and my favourite bank next. I was born in Australia in the 1980s.

How has this shaped you?
I don’t have a counterfactual on that. Sign me up for that reincarnation thing, and I’ll get back to you once I have a sample size greater than one.

What kind of undergraduate were you?
The oddbod, broke, working-class kind. I attended five different universities during my studies, but with my cash jobs and unemployment cheques, I got through in the end.

What’s your most memorable moment at university?
Finishing.

If you weren’t an academic, what do you think you’d be doing?
Still being an unskilled labourer in the Australian bush, or joining my cousins on the coast and surfing all day.

Your work has debunked ‘extreme ageing’. Where did the idea come from?
It came from a long and unfortunate acquaintance with ageing research. In 2017, I debunked a paper that had accidentally used the wrong column in a life table, rounded off most of the data to zero, somehow log-transformed these zeros into ones, decided that a string of ones does not change much over time, and been published in Nature. If you use the correct column in the life table, the entire paper dissolves, yet it’s still there, unretracted. I came up with a theoretical reason that all extreme-age data will be non-random errors and decided to test that hypothesis by tracking down 80 per cent of the 110+-year-olds in the world.

It sounds quite a simple idea – that there simply isn’t evidence to back up many of these claims. Why did it take so long for someone to look into this?
I think there has long been a toxic environment in ageing research. It appears to be systemic, and absurdities thrive in the cracks of this ugly environment. They even seem to have a near-indeterminate lifespan, because honest criticism is career kryptonite. Take, for example, my work showing that the birthdays of extreme-age record holders are often multiples of five and 10: a phenomenon called “age heaping”. Checking for age heaping is the most basic check of demographic data quality possible – a test taught to undergraduates. So why, after decades of work on these databases, was I the first to point out that extreme-age data failed such a basic test? Is there an answer to that question that does not involve research misconduct, systematic bullying or stupendous incompetence? If there is, I’d love to hear it. So far, it’s crickets.

What are the ramifications of this? Is this bad news for any technology billionaires trying to live forever?
The ramifications are much larger than some doomed vanity projects. These data are the empirical support for late-life mortality models and are used by the United Nations to project how many humans society has to plan and care for during the next 100 years. The repercussions of this are shocking. If our data and models of old-age survival are junk – and the absolute lack of answers emerging from the demographic community certainly suggests they are – these projections will be deeply flawed: how many hospitals we require, how many doctors we have to train, what level our insurance premiums are set at, and how much we need to save for retirement will all be based on bad data. The demographic community needs to stop ignoring the scale of such problems and re-examine all of our assumptions on human age measurement. The problem is far more serious than the deeply unserious moonshot projects of billionaires, fad diets or who gets bragging rights in the Guinness World Records.

Do you think the academic community should pay more attention to the Ig Nobels?
I think academics should pay more attention to the critical re-evaluation of past ideas, and the active need to combat hype and misinformation. I can see an incredible kind of cognitive game going on in academia at the moment, where people have kind of accepted the concept that “most research is false” as a general concept, as there seem to have been no effective responses to such meta-analysis of our collective efforts. Academics are failing to acknowledge the hard realities of the follow-on question: which academic research is false in particular? The part of my Ig Nobel that I hope people pay attention to, in other fields and my own, is how strikingly rare my type of criticism has become. It seems that I am utterly alone here, in my field, in having the capacity to flag tragicomically bad science at large scales. The deeply flawed records in demography are emblematic of this failure. The original “blue zone” paper proposed that inbreeding was good for longevity. Yet who called that out as bad science in the past 20 years? It is one of the most popular ideas in demography, for decades, but who ever called this out? Nobody.

Is this what you would like to be remembered for?
No, I want to be remembered for ending AIDS and climate change, before sticky-taping some dictators to the outside of a pre-launch space mission that discovers life on Europa. It’s not going to happen, but I can dream.

patrick.jack@timeshighereducation.com

CV

2007-09 BSc in biological anthropology, Australian National University
2010-15 PhD in medical science, ANU
2015-18 Postdoctoral fellow in plant science, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation
2018-21 Senior postdoctoral fellow in human ageing and genomics, ANU
2021-24 Research associate, Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Research, University of Oxford
2023-present Senior research fellow, Oxford Institute for Population Ageing, Oxford
2024-present Senior research fellow in applied statistics and data science, UCL
2024 Ig Nobel Laureate in Demography

Appointments

Damien Page has been appointed vice-chancellor of Buckinghamshire New University and will take on the role on the retirement of Nick Braisby next year. He joined the institution as deputy vice-chancellor last year, having previously been executive lead for research and knowledge exchange and dean of the Faculty of Education, Health and Wellbeing at the University of Wolverhampton. Council chair Maggie Galliers said Professor Page would bring a “wealth of experience and expertise” to the post.

Adam Fenech has joined the Canadian University Dubai as provost. He was previously director of the Climate Research Lab at the University of Prince Edward Island, having earlier taught at the University of Toronto and the Smithsonian Institution, and worked with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He said CUD was “uniquely poised to be an agile institution that can change and grow relatively quickly in comparison to other universities”.

Mohamed Sami Abdel Sadek, acting president of Cairo University, has been confirmed in the role on an ongoing basis. Prior to that he was a professor in the Faculty of Law.

Neena Mitter has joined Charles Sturt University as deputy vice-chancellor (associate) for global research. She was previously director of the Centre for Horticultural Science at the University of Queensland.

Matt Snowden has been appointed associate provost, leading on industry engagement, at the University of Derby. He was previously dean of academic partnerships and director of research and enterprise operations at the University of West London.

Pouyan Nejadhashemi has been named director of the Institute of Water Research at Michigan State University. He is a professor in the departments of biosystems and agricultural engineering, and plant, soil and microbial sciences.

Taylor Umland will lead the University of Salford’s new sports journalism course, joining from Leeds Beckett University.