p. 53-59
In these pages, the author talks about life expectancy and how much it has improved since the 1800s.
There’s a graph on page 55 that got me doing some rudimentary research. The graph shows the average life expectancy from 1800 to 2017.
I’ll use numbers to establish some sort of order here.
- So it appears that until 1920 average life expectancy was stuck at around 30 years.
- In 1920 there was a sharp decline due to the Spanish flu when average life expectancy dropped to slightly over 20 years. So that’s about 10 years humanity moved backward instead of staying steady or progressing.
- But life expectancy recovered quickly to 30 years again as far as I can tell from the graph within a year.
- Then there was continuous progress and life expectancy had reached about 40 years in 1940. So 10 years up in 20 years
- World War II messed that a bit
- But in 1960 life expectancy climbed some 15 years, slightly above 50 years.
- Then it kept moving upwards until it reached about 70 years today.
What I find interesting about this timeline is that recent articles I’ve read some I remember via Gate’s Notes talk about how the world today is not prepared to deal with another pandemic like the Spanish flu.
What I found even more interesting was the question: what could have been the most important, I assumed medical, discovery that changed the graph from a flat line to a continuous upward line?
Here’s where the rudimentary research comes in. A quick search online gave me this Wikipedia page with the medical inventions by year.
So I looked at the inventions after 1920. It seems the discovery of a few vaccines and of penicillin might have done the trick.
• 1923 – First vaccine for diphtheria
• 1926 – First vaccine for pertussis
• 1927 – First vaccine for tuberculosis
• 1927 – First vaccine for tetanus
• 1928 – Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin
Then I looked at the time from 1940 to 1960. So here are those that stood out to me:
• 1943 – Willem J. Kolff build the first dialysis machine
• 1946 – Chemotherapy – Alfred G. Gilman and Louis S. Goodman
• 1947 – Defibrillator – Claude Beck
• 1953 – Heart-lung machine – John Heysham Gibbon
• 1953 – Medical ultrasonography – Inge Edler
• 1954 – Joseph Murray performs the first human kidney transplant (on identical twins)
• 1955 – Tetracycline – Lloyd Conover
• 1958 – Pacemaker – Rune Elmqvist
• 1960 – Invention of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR)
It seems that a wider range and of increased complexity inventions were needed for the second increase in life expectancy.
I guess after the 20’s the vaccines and the first (I assume) antibiotic (penicillin) helped with young people to survive.
So maybe we can assume that a human (on average let’s not forget, as the book keeps reminding us there is a range with most people in the middle) could reach 30 years before something got to him, not because that’s how long the human organism could live. That is to say, the human didn’t simply evolve to be able to live longer but human ingenuity managed to fight against threats.
There’s a middle period, say from 1943 to 1947, where medical inventions contributed in both the examined spikes in life expectancy. All the inventions from 1943 to 1960, seem to be dealing with issues that one can encounter at all ages but mostly of 30 years of age and over (defibrillator, pacemaker).
There’s also the discovery of another antibiotic (tetracycline). It should be interesting to read a research with those inventions and perhaps all the others mentioned in the Wikipedia page as factors to determine how much the first and the second antibiotic contributed in the increase of life expectancy during those separate examined periods.
I assume penicillin was a major contributor, understandably, but what about the second antibiotic? If its contribution was significant as well, then perhaps we should worry about the so-called superbugs and all the noise regarding the tolerance humans have built of the current antibiotics. I mean that combined with the fact that the world might not be prepared for another pandemic doesn’t sound too good…
A final note on this is just how the first time around we needed tools against threats to young people’s health, and then we needed tools for older people’s health, now we need tools for health issues arising at around 70 years of age.
I suppose that’s mostly Alzheimer’s and cancer. On the cancer issue, it’s interesting to look at the potential differences between those who get cancer after 80 years of an overall healthy life and those who are struck by the disease at a younger age.
Of course, as people get to enjoy longer life spans then issues of lifestyle, like nutrition and exercise and bad habits like smoking or drugs of all kinds, start playing an important part as well.
There have been a couple of articles in the news recently about how humans may not have reached peak age yet. The oldest one who’s lived has managed 122 years.
Going by the timeline even if the medical inventions in the next say 20 years manage to affect an increase in life expectancy of say 20 years, that’s an average life expectancy of 90.
Not bad. But I suppose that doesn’t mean much if it’s not accompanied by good quality of health and life.
I’ll close with a brief note on inequality. There’s another graph on page 57. It shows how everyone, rich or poor, is better off in terms of health.
BUT #1
It also shows how some poor countries today enjoy the same health quality as some rich countries did in the 1920’s, or even worse in the 1890’s. So there’s always going to be some sort of inequality, isn’t it?
That’s evidence that disproves my theory above too, right? Unless of course it only means that access in those countries to the medical inventions is very, very low. Or if access isn’t low, then, perhaps, the quality of nutrition and harder work (in terms of physical exertion) play a big part in life expectancy? Or maybe it’s more about social factors like violence?
This is a very interesting topic overall, but I’ll leave you with a more philosophical question.
What are humans supposed to do with all those extra years they’ve gained as a species? Is it simply so that we can enjoy life or are we supposed to be doing something more with it than simply living?
I mean all humanity’s problems seem to stem from all those inequalities we’ve talked about in these series of posts. So if all this inequality was gone, then what? Is it simply live and enjoy? Would we get bored or would we manage to find this transcended state of happiness everyone seems to be looking for?
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