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:
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 healthcare system that was designed for treating acute disease in the 1960s and 1970s, which is now having to manage all these chronic diseases in the people growing old, don’t be surprised if the old model doesn’t work.