Ageing: Science, Technology and Healthy Living (Science and Technology Committee Report)

Viscount Ridley Excerpts

Wednesday 20th October 2021 Grand Committee

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

My Lords, it is an honour to follow that eloquent speech from the noble Baroness, Lady Greenfield, and her strictures are well made. I begin by commending the noble Lord, Lord Patel, not only on securing this debate but on steering the committee through a vital and largely virtual piece of work. He did so with charm, wisdom and not a little fierceness when necessary.

The main issue that our report grapples with, as others have said, is the gap between health span and lifespan. We are spending longer living, but even longer dying. We would all like to live lives of perfect health until, one day, we drop dead, but it does not happen that way and the gap is not closing. I am horrified to hear the statistics from the noble Lord, Lord Patel, and that, as a 63 year-old, my health span is coming to an end. By largely or partly exterminating the quick killers, such as smallpox and heart attacks, we have left ourselves with slower killers, such as cancer and Alzheimer’s.

The first thing to say is that this is a problem born of success. The defeat of premature mortality is a spectacular triumph of modern medicine and we should not forget that. In my lifetime, global life expectancy has increased by about five hours per day; it has gone from 49 to 71. Let us not be so keen to complain about the failure to defeat the morbidities of old age that we forget to celebrate these unprecedented achievements. I am not wholly convinced that better leadership and accountability by government on the grand challenge would necessarily have made a big difference in the last few years.

As the noble Lord, Lord Patel, said, the central issue with which we grappled was how to close the gaps between health span and lifespan and between rich and poor. There are four possible ways to do it: we can teach young people not to get into unhealthy habits, such as obesity and lack of exercise, which will make them unwell in old age; we can learn to treat people’s illnesses better when they get ill in old age; we can diagnose illnesses better and earlier, as the noble Baroness said; or we can do research into the underlying mechanisms of ageing in the hope of finding preventive therapies. Today, I argue that, from what I heard in the inquiry, the first and second suggestions are unlikely to work very well; the third and fourth may be much more important.

I am a little cynical about public health advice to the young as a cure for old age. In the report, we say that

“a life-course approach to healthy ageing is to be commended”

and that

“There are advantages to adopting healthy lifestyles earlier in life.”


But we lament that

“We heard differing views on whether young people tend to engage with the issue of healthy ageing”,


which is a bit of a euphemism, yet we recommended

“regulatory and fiscal measures, actively to encourage people to adopt lifestyles that support healthy ageing”.

That would all be great, but do we really think that we can tell the young that they must drink in moderation now to prepare for a sedate old age, free of illness, or that they will believe that we can deliver that promise? After all, lots of us adhere to Hunter S Thompson’s advice, even in middle and old age:

“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming ‘Wow! What a Ride!’”


We sort of admit in this report that solving the problem of the gap between health span and lifespan through public health advice is not working but say that we should do more of it.

On treating people’s illnesses better, we rightly focused on multimorbidity. One doctor treats one symptom, another treats another and the fact that the patient has five things wrong with him at the same time either is ignored or, worse, leads to multiple medications that interfere with each other. “Polypharmacy” was a word that I learned during this inquiry.

I like to think that we can reform healthcare in such a way as to do better at this, but it will be a Sisyphean task, because the rise of multimorbidity is, to some extent, an inevitable consequence of defeating premature mortality. Someone with multiple organs failing at once is simply expressing their biological sell-by date. It is an interesting fact that when supercentenarians—people older than 110—die, they generally just fade away with no particular cause. The machine just stops. Even cancer cells struggle to keep going in their elderly bodies.

By the way, an even more interesting fact is that, while the number of people reaching 100 goes up and up all the time, the number reaching 115 remains extremely small and has hardly changed in decades. There really is a sell-by date on human life. Jeanne Calment, who is the only person to get past 119 and supposedly died at the age of 122 in the 1990s, had probably swapped her birth certificate with her mother’s, we now think. There is currently one 117 year-old and one 118 year-old woman alive in the world and no man older than 113, I think. For those worried about pensions, it is a good thing that we just ain’t going to live to 150—not without genetic engineering, at least.

That leaves diagnosis and research. I genuinely think that the best thing we can do for the elderly and the best way to help to close the gap of social inequality is to diagnose people’s ailments sooner. It disappoints me that this country does not seem as keen on early diagnosis as other countries sometimes are. As for research, like the noble Baroness, Lady Greenfield, I am convinced that Britain, with its terrific bioscience expertise, has a great opportunity to make a huge contribution to the underlying science of ageing. Therein we might find a way to treat people either with senolytic drugs or with telomerase to give them the bodies of 40 year-olds in their 80s, followed by a sudden death at 110. That seems a noble goal, which the Government should heartily embrace. In his reply, will the Minister tell us what the Government are doing to support ambitious research into both the mechanisms of ageing and the value of early diagnosis?