Long live humankind

doi:10.1126/science.abi4718

GSTDTAP > 气候变化

DOI	10.1126/science.abi4718
	Long live humankind
	Alyson A. van Raalte
	2021-05-21
发表期刊	Science
出版年	2021
英文摘要	The average person in the longest-living populations has gained an extra 50 years of life in just a handful of generations. Such an extraordinary achievement should be headline news. Instead, our preference for attending to acute, dramatic events leaves little space for the acknowledgment of this remarkable, incremental accomplishment. In Extra Life , science writer Steven Johnson sets out to remedy this. After centuries of stagnation, life expectancy began to climb in earnest in northwestern Europe starting around the middle of the 19th century. The reason for this has for decades been the source of heated debates among scholars. Johnson discusses the most important of these factors, which include vaccination, the collection of vital statistics, pasteurization, drug regulation and testing, antibiotics, car and industrial safety, and agricultural innovations such as synthetic fertilizer. There are two main ways that this book is set apart from others that have previously touched on this subject. First, Johnson introduces the reader to a lively cast of characters involved in the most important innovations that have contributed to our longer life spans. These include both the discoverers themselves and their “amplifiers”—those with high social capital who were vital in promoting the innovation in question. Second, he gives almost equal weight to the usual proximate causes of mortality decline—for example, vaccination, antibiotics, improved nutrition, safe drinking water—and to “less tangible innovations,” such as the collection and analysis of data. As a result, well-trodden stories about Edward Jenner discovering vaccination or Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur isolating bacterial strains are balanced with anecdotes about lesser-known statistical innovators. For example, readers are introduced to John Graunt, founder of the life table, which allowed ages at death to be compared across populations with different age structures, and to John Snow, who developed spatial epidemiological techniques to trace the waterborne source of the 1854 cholera pandemic in London. Readers also learn about the work of Austin Bradford Hill and Richard Doll, who introduced the randomized controlled trial in medicine, and William Foege, who put forward the ring vaccination approach to snuff out epidemic outbreaks. Why aren't these individuals also household names? In Johnson's view: “You can't put the randomized controlled trial on display in a science museum.” The book magnificently transports the reader to some truly horrific historical episodes that would send the most ardent of libertarians knocking on the doors of government regulators. My personal favorite was Johnson's description of the swill milk scandal of mid-19th century New York—so named after the practice of feeding cows the waste products from nearby distilleries, which had the unfortunate side effect of turning the milk blue (a problem solved by adulterating the milk with chalk, flour, and eggs). If there is one main takeaway from the book, it is that the public sector has made many positive contributions to public health over the long course of history, spurring innovation and creating effective institutions and regulatory bodies that have saved countless lives. The World Health Organization is singled out in particular for its successful eradication of smallpox during the heated Cold War political era. The book's weakest sections, surprisingly, are those describing the very trend central to its theme. It is no secret that life expectancy is one of the most poorly understood statistics in the world, and Johnson misses an opportunity to educate readers on why we use life expectancy, what it measures, and, importantly, what it does not. He gets caught in some of the usual traps—jumping between period (calendar year) and cohort (birth year) mortality statistics as though they are interchangeable. Johnson is certainly not the first to make this mistake, but it would not have hurt to remind readers that the COVID-19–induced shock to life expectancy will not reduce our own future survival prospects once the pandemic has run its course. Extra Life is accompanied by an excellent four-part documentary series of the same name from Nutopia, which debuted on PBS on 11 May. While complementary, the book and documentary series have somewhat different stories to tell. The COVID-19 pandemic comes across as a tangential backdrop to the story being told in the book—a devastating hiccup in the overall arc of progress. The series, on the other hand, uses the pandemic as a lens through which to take stock of the medical, data, and social innovations of the past century. This includes a greater focus on the social determinants of health, including racism, as well as on the origins of many of our most effective behavioral innovations in fighting infectious disease. Precisely because of the moment we find ourselves in, Extra Life could not be timelier. Both the book and the series strike an uplifting tone, reminding readers of what humanity has accomplished by working together toward the common good.
领域	气候变化 ; 资源环境
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引用统计
文献类型	期刊论文
条目标识符	http://119.78.100.173/C666/handle/2XK7JSWQ/328809
专题	气候变化资源环境科学
推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714	Alyson A. van Raalte. Long live humankind[J]. Science,2021.
APA	Alyson A. van Raalte.(2021).Long live humankind.Science.
MLA	Alyson A. van Raalte."Long live humankind".Science (2021).