The world’s oldest man, a retired chemist and parapsychologist, has died in New York City aged 111.
Alexander Imich, who was born in Poland in 1903 and survived a Soviet Gulag labor camp, died yesterday, according to Marcy Levitt, executive director of the nursing home in which he lived.
Mr Imich emigrated to the United States in the 1950s and was a scholar of the occult. He edited an anthology called Incredible Tales of the Paranormal in 1995 at the age of 92.
He turned 111 in February and, in April, assumed the rank of oldest living man, according to the Gerontology Research Group of Torrance, California.
That ranking now goes to Sakari Momoi of Japan, born on February 5th, 1903, one day after Mr Imich, according to the research group.
Guinness World Records awarded Mr Imich the title of oldest living man on May 8th.
Dozens of women are older than Mr Imich, according to Gerontology Research Group, and the oldest of them, Misao Okawa of Japan, is 116.
Mr Imich had credited good genes for his long life.
"But the life you live is equally or more important for longevity," he told Reuters last month in an interview in his apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side.
Agencies