12 years of life added over the last 50 years

Listening to Professor Sir John Bell interviewed by John Burn-Murdoch on Radical, 28 May 2026:we haven’t really told the story properly, and it’s gone sort of unrecognised in my view, but since I was a medical student to now, we have, in the UK, added 12 years to life expectancy, on average, for every person in the country […] 12 years is a lot […]I found Health trends and variation in England, 2025 (PDF), and it all checks out: Life expectancy doubled over the last 200 years (page 12) Eyeballing this one, yeah, looks about right for 12 years gained over that sort of time JB makes the point that we don’t make much fuss over this, and we should:you know, when Elon Musk sends a rocket up that comes down and lands somewhere, everyone shouts and says it’s all terrific […] that in my view is a trivial contribution compared to adding 12 years of life to everybody.This success (with lifespan, not the rockets) is a source of a struggle we have:[…] if you’ve added 18% of activity to a…