Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer

Great science writing about the main things that have doubled average human life expectancy in the last couple hundred years. I especially liked that he dug beneath the typical story about the discovery of penicillin for example. Yeah, the story of Alexander Fleming and his moldy Petri dish is gone over, but so many other people and institutions were involved. Really shows how progress in these matters is a group project, and different fields of science all contribute.

The author reviews the key factors which drove up life expectancy and how they came to be. The story is a perfect “science” communication piece because the author takes apart these factors into what it really rakes for knowledge to become life saving practice.

There are many important things to note:
- how culturally we celebrate wars so much more than health innovation which saves lives
- how we believe that private sector delivers results in health innovation when it is mostly been able to deliver distribution
- how health innovation is so much more complicated than the science alone because how it translates to policy makes all the difference
- how dogma even in the science community can make it hard to deliver health

Basically the show more vision of how science impacts health in the public is so different from what actually happened and how technology impacted life expectancy. Pretty much everyone should be aware of this history, particularly in a pandemic.

Good health needs passionate evidence based drivers, and a practical public policy translation… show less