A world without ageing

Free bonus chapter of Ageless: The new science of getting older without getting old

Unlike the other chapters, the references for A world without ageing are published in full here because the chapter is available for free online.

As well as the specific references that follow, I found the first two listed here to be good general introductions to the ideas in this chapter:

Oxford University’s Dr Anders Sandberg on if dictators could live forever, the annual risk of nuclear war, solar flares, and more (The 80,000 Hours Podcast, 2018). ageless.link/vns4wn
Sebastian Sethe and João Pedro de Magalhães, Ethical perspectives in biogerontology, in Ethics, Health Policy and (Anti-) Aging: Mixed Blessings, (ed. Maartje Schermer and Wim Pinxten) (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2013). DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-3870-6\_13 ageless.link/w6bkxb
A 2013 poll of Americans…
Cary Funk, Living to 120 and beyond: Americans’ views on aging, medical advances and radical life extension (Pew Research Center, 2013). ageless.link/jrmgc3
…another study asked…
Yoni Donner, Kristen Fortney, Stuart R. G. Calimport et al. Great desire for extended life and health amongst the American public, Frontiers in Genetics 6, 353 (2015). DOI: 10.3389/fgene.2015.00353 ageless.link/ace4co
…shared incredibly unequally…
Calculations and sources at ageless.link/kboyfx
…the population in 2050 would be 11.3 billion…
Own calculation based on UN population projection data. Read how this was done at ageless.link/pvu669
A study considering a more realistic scenario…
Barry B. Hughes, Randall Kuhn, Eli S. Margolese-Malin et al. Opportunities and challenges of a world with negligible senescence, Technological Forecasting and Social Change 99, 77–91 (2015). DOI: 10.1016/j.techfore.2015.06.031 ageless.link/mqp6rk
…world fertility rate has plummeted…
Max Roser, Fertility rate, Our World in Data (2014). ageless.link/64e7nj
…aged over 40 than under 20.
Births in England and Wales (Office for National Statistics, 2021). ageless.link/9qmdx3
Vital events reference tables 2018 (National Records of Scotland; National Records of Scotland, 2019). ageless.link/4rws4k
Birth statistics (Northern Ireland Statistics; Research Agency, 2018). ageless.link/hucg67
The Scottish and Northern Irish statistics actually show slightly more babies born to women under 20 than over 40, but England and Wales have a much larger population so the overall UK figures reflect the statistic quoted.
…average fertility across the EU is 1.5…
Fertility rate, total (births per woman), European Union (World Bank). ageless.link/mprptf
…assume that life expectancy increases…
You can see graphs of these underwhelming forecasts in my document about population projections in an ageless world at ageless.link/pvu669
…many serious demographers are worrying about underpopulation…
Justin Fox, The population bomb is fizzling, but that won’t save the planet, Bloomberg Opinion (2019). ageless.link/zbkpic
The global vaccination rate…was 85%…
Samantha Vanderslott, Bernadeta Dadonaite and Max Roser, Vaccination, Our World in Data (2013). ageless.link/xwqdfa
…the picture is still substantially rosier…
Watch the brilliant Hans Rosling berating Swedes for their wildly inaccurate perceptions of global vaccination rates in this video (the relevant section starts at 14:54, but the whole video is worth watching).
Hans Rosling, Immunisation trends and child surviva, GAVI Alliance Mid-Term Review meeting, 2013. ageless.link/o3rdst
Once they go off-patent…prices usually fall significantly.
Gerard T. Vondeling, Qi Cao, Maarten J. Postma et al. The impact of patent expiry on drug prices: A systematic literature review, Appl. Health Econ. Health Policy 16, 653–60 (2018). DOI: 10.1007/s40258-018-0406-6 ageless.link/so4f6u
…metformin and off-patent statins…cost cents per dose…
National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, retrieved December 2021 ageless.link/ss973t
…probably ‘only’ a five-figure sum…
Ezekiel Emanuel, We can’t afford the drugs that could cure cancer (Wall Street Journal, 2018). ageless.link/djizj3
…the NHS…paying an undisclosed sum…
NICE recommends another revolutionary CAR T-cell therapy for adults with lymphoma (NICE, 2019). ageless.link/v9jhoc
…the procedure is still entirely manual…
Siddhartha Mukherjee, The promise and price of cellular therapies, The New Yorker 2019. ageless.link/wtxgdk
The current cost of dementia…is estimated to be over $1 trillion worldwide…
The costs are shown in Figure 6.1 of this report, whose axis is mislabelled: it reads millions, rather than billions.
Martin J. Prince et al., World Alzheimer report 2015: The global impact of dementia, Alzheimer's Disease International 2015. ageless.link/ucsaf9
Over half of dementia sufferers…
Prince et al. ageless.link/ucsaf9
…salty, sugary water…
Bernadeta Dadonaite, Oral rehydration therapy: A low-tech solution that has saved millions of lives, Our World in Data (2019). ageless.link/zoossd
…spending on healthcare…GDP per capita…
GDP per capita (current US$), middle income and high income countries (World Bank). ageless.link/u4rm9p
…it will be the moral duty of the rich world…
Hughes, Kuhn, Margolese-Malin et al. 2015 ageless.link/mqp6rk
…3.6 years to a dictator’s life expectancy.
Sandberg 2018 ageless.link/vns4wn
…this quote has quite the pedigree.
Science makes progress funeral by funeral, Quote Investigator 2017. ageless.link/4a6yte
…a clever large-scale analysis of papers…
Pierre Azoulay, Christian Fons-Rosen and Joshua S. Graff Zivin, Does science advance one funeral at a time? Working Paper 21788 (National Bureau of Economic Research, 2015). DOI: 10.3386/w21788 ageless.link/bm9szo
Attitudes to homosexuality have improved…
Fred C. Pampel, Cohort changes in the social distribution of tolerant sexual attitudes, Social Forces 95, 753–77 (2016). DOI: 10.1093/sf/sow069 ageless.link/o7nvct
…there is little evidence that cohort replacement is driving change…
Erik W. Johnson and Philip Schwadel, It is not a cohort thing: Interrogating the relationship between age, cohort, and support for the environment, Environment and Behavior 51(7):879–901 (2019). DOI: 10.1177/0013916518780483 ageless.link/iycguh
Delia Lloyd, Debunking the climate change generation gap (Oxford Institute of Population Ageing Blog, 2021). ageless.link/ixk4my
Ageing of the brain is driven by the same processes…
Sethe and de Magalhães 2013 ageless.link/w6bkxb