Debunking a case that is widely accepted by the scientific community is like seeing a piece of a movie set fall over: You realize in a moment that the saloon in the spaghetti western is not a two-story building but a painted two-dimensional prop made of plywood. You have the illusion of solidity in one moment, an incredulous feeling of having been tricked in the next, and after a stunned second you begin looking at the entire street thinking, “I bet that brothel’s made of cardboard.” I had this feeling on a regular basis once I began investigating the world’s oldest people. Some cases required no effort at all.
At one point, for example, the oldest woman in the United States was Adele Dunlap, a former smoker and occasional drinker. Adele kept insisting that the records had her age wrong. In a farcical, tragicomically weird end to her life, nobody believed her, and she was collectively rubbished for being unable to remember her real age.
Despite consistently claiming for almost a decade that her paperwork was wrong, and that she was a decade younger than her documents suggested, Adele was duly informed by newspapers that she was mistaken about herself. The academics knew better. A typical exchange ran thus: “Asked how it felt to be 113, Dunlap… looked her questioner in the eye and answered: ‘I’m 104.’” The reporter shot her down: “She’s not.
The Los Angeles-based Gerontology Research Group [GRG], which tracks supercentenarians, or people 110 and older, has validated her age.” Faced with a contradiction, Robert Young—director of the GRG, who certifies age records for the Guinness World Records—told this woman on her deathbed that she was wrong and that she was certified as the oldest woman in the country. It also made a lie of the idea that errors in age records will be discarded if, under cross-examination, any flaws are found in the biography of extremely old people. This woman spent her terminal years repeating on a loop that she was not the oldest woman in America.
The Obamas even sent her a birthday card to congratulate her on being 113. Adele Dunlap was a supercentenarian whether she liked it or not. It’s worth pausing to look at the man behind the validation of cases like Dunlap’s before moving on.
Robert Young’s capacity for fair judgment—the thing that case validations rest on—should be unimpeachable. Instead, he holds some irregular opinions. His master’s thesis alone is enlightening.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
