與長壽相伴隨的難題

Is the rise in life expectancy in the west coming to an end? If you look at the data it seems so. In March this year Britain’s Office for National Statistics announced something depressing: a slight fall in life expectancy for pensioners — six months for women and four for men.

西方預(yù)期壽命不再上升了嗎?如果你看相關(guān)數(shù)據(jù)，答案似乎是肯定的。今年3月，英國國家統(tǒng)計局(Office For National Statistics)宣布了令人沮喪的事情：養(yǎng)老金領(lǐng)取者的預(yù)期壽命略有下降——女性下降了6個月，男性下降了4個月。

Overall, life expectancy is still ticking up but at a much slower rate than everyone thought it would — at a time when there is no war on; no nasty new disease on the rampage; and no particular life-shortening social problem evident. Numbers out from the ONS this week show an increase of 0.1 per cent for a child born between 2014 and 2016. There might be 571,245 people in their nineties living in the UK, but current data suggest that most of us will still only make it to our mid-to-late eighties.

總體而言，預(yù)期壽命仍在上升，但速度遠低于所有人的預(yù)期——如今沒有大規(guī)模戰(zhàn)爭、沒有什么惡性的新疾病在肆虐，也沒有任何明顯的導(dǎo)致壽命縮短的特殊社會問題。英國國家統(tǒng)計局近日發(fā)布的數(shù)據(jù)顯示，2014年至2016年出生的孩子的預(yù)期壽命上升了0.1%。英國上90歲的人可能有57.1245萬，但當前數(shù)據(jù)表明，我們大多數(shù)人仍然只能活到85至89歲之間。

This isn’t just happening in the UK. In 2016 life expectancy in the US fell for the first time since 1993 — and the rate of growth has slowed in most other developed countries. The average American woman is now forecast to only just scrape into her eighties — and her husband probably won’t.

這種情況不只發(fā)生在英國。2016年，美國預(yù)期壽命出現(xiàn)自1993年以來的首次下降，其他發(fā)達國家的預(yù)期壽命上升速度也大多放緩。美國普通女性的預(yù)期壽命如今僅為80歲出頭，她們的丈夫可能還達不到這一水平。

There is no shortage of experts out there prepared to explain why life expectancy has stalled. Maybe it’s a result of the financial crisis, a failure of elderly care linked to austerity? Maybe it’s obesity, something that could even make today’s young the first generation to live shorter lives than their parents? Or maybe it is just that we are already close to the outer limits of possibility when it comes to life expectancy?

有的是專家準備解釋預(yù)期壽命為何停止增長?；蛟S這是金融危機的結(jié)果，因緊縮措施導(dǎo)致的老年人護理不得力?或許是因為肥胖——肥胖甚至可能讓如今的年輕人成為第一代壽命不如他們父母的人?也可能只是因為我們已經(jīng)接近了預(yù)期壽命的客觀極限?

Yet look a little closer and talk to longevity experts and healthcare investors and a different picture emerges. The slowdown in life expectancy actually comes at a time when the science of ageing is getting very exciting. Much of the rise in life expectancy of the past 50 years has been down to environmental effects: the near eradication of real poverty in the west; the rise of universal medical treatment; antibiotics; better air quality; improved working conditions.

然而，再仔細研究一下，并與長壽專家和醫(yī)療領(lǐng)域投資者交談一番，就會發(fā)現(xiàn)不同的答案。預(yù)期壽命增長放緩實際上發(fā)生在老齡化科學(xué)取得振奮人心的進展之際。過去50年的預(yù)期壽命增長很大程度上是環(huán)境效應(yīng)導(dǎo)致的：西方基本消除實際貧困、全民醫(yī)療的興起、抗生素的出現(xiàn)、空氣質(zhì)量以及工作條件改善。

There is more of this to come. Look around today and you will see a good fewer heavy smoking, overweight drinkers knocking about than was the case a decade or so ago. We are also still getting a helping hand from the gift that never stops giving: evolution. New research from geneticists at Columbia University suggests it is weeding out genetic variants linked to Alzheimer’s disease and heavy smoking.

還會有更多的環(huán)境效應(yīng)。環(huán)顧四周，你會發(fā)現(xiàn)，與大約十年前相比，街頭閑逛的又抽煙又酗酒的胖子要少得多。我們還在從永遠不會停止的進化中得到幫助。哥倫比亞大學(xué)(Columbia University)的遺傳學(xué)家們的新研究表明，進化正在消除與阿爾茨海默癥(Alzheimer's)和過度吸煙相關(guān)的基因變異。

All these things should keep adding a little more to the numbers. They are also just the beginning. Next will come an enhanced understanding of what actually causes ageing and how it can be stalled, alongside the start of mass molecular fiddling. One example of the latter. You will have read about Silicon Valley tycoons having regular blood transfusions to rejuvenate. But most people involved in the longevity business are less likely to be doing this than be taking the generic — and very cheap — diabetes drug metformin, on the basis that it keeps blood sugar levels stable and so slows ageing for non-diabetics too.

所有這些應(yīng)該會讓預(yù)期壽命更長一些。這也僅僅是開始。接下來我們將更深入地理解究竟是什么導(dǎo)致衰老，以及如何才能停止衰老，此外開始大規(guī)模地搗鼓分子。后者的一個例子是，你應(yīng)該會看到有關(guān)硅谷巨頭定期輸血以恢復(fù)活力的報道。但致力于長壽事業(yè)的人大多不太可能這么做，他們只能使用非常便宜的治療糖尿病的基因藥物二甲雙胍，因為它讓血糖水平保持穩(wěn)定，從而也延緩了非糖尿病患者的衰老。

In their new book Juvenesence: Investing in the Age of Longevity, Jim Mellon and Al Chalabi forecast that within the next 20 years average life expectancy in the developed world will rise to between 110 and 120. We will enter a new world in which “genetic engineering, cellular enhancements and organ replacements” will give us all the chance to be super centenarians. Adopt the right lifestyle and drugs to make it through the next 10 or 20 years and these technologies could give you at least another 20.

吉姆•梅隆(Jim Mellon)和阿爾•沙拉比(Ahmed Chalabi)在他們的新書《恢復(fù)活力：投資于長壽時代》(Juvenesence: Investing in the Age of Longevity)中預(yù)測，在未來20年內(nèi)，發(fā)達世界平均預(yù)期壽命將上升到110歲至120歲之間。我們將進入一個新的世界，“基因工程、細胞強化和器官移植”將讓我們?nèi)加锌赡艹蔀榘贇q老人。采用正確的生活方式和藥物來度過未來的10年或20年，這些技術(shù)可能至少讓你多活20年。

This makes the authors happy: their book is full of soothing thoughts about how the old patterns of our lives — be born, learn, earn, retire, expire — will soon be upended. We will “learn continuously”, have multiple careers and hobbies, and will start and connect with our families in very different ways. 這讓上述兩位作者感到高興：他們的著作充斥著對我們舊的生活模式——出生、學(xué)習(xí)、收入、退休和死亡——如何很快被顛覆的寬慰性想法。我們將“不斷地學(xué)習(xí)”，有多個職業(yè)和愛好，而且組建家庭和與家人聯(lián)系的方式也會與以前截然不同。

That’s going to sound lovely to most people. But you can bet there is a large group who find it totally terrifying: policymakers. Ageing populations are very expensive. Our systems aren’t yet in any way equipped to cope with the odd half a million 90-year-olds the UK has already, let alone millions of 100-year olds. Our health and welfare systems were designed for a different era, and the unfunded liabilities of public and private pension funds are the kind of thing that never get addressed. This should make individuals worry, too.

這對大多數(shù)人來說聽起來很美好。但你可以肯定有一大群人會發(fā)現(xiàn)它非?？膳拢蔷褪钦咧贫ㄕ?。老齡化人口非常昂貴。我們的體系已經(jīng)不管怎樣都應(yīng)付不了英國現(xiàn)有的50多萬的90歲老人，更別提數(shù)百萬百歲老人了。我們的健康和醫(yī)療體系是針對一個不同的時代設(shè)計的，公共和私人養(yǎng)老基金的無資金準備的負債是那種永遠也得不到解決的問題。這應(yīng)該也讓個人感到擔(dān)憂。

Very few people have planned properly for their own retirements — and even if they have, extended longevity will mean that the assumptions on which they have based their calculations are entirely wrong. On top of this, almost no one will have planned for the fact that this will make governments that don’t seriously reform — my guess is that’s all of them — increasingly broke. Nor will they have planned for the obvious next step: that cash-strapped governments look to other people’s capital for help.

很少有人為他們自己的退休做出正確的規(guī)劃——即便他們做了規(guī)劃，壽命延長也將意味著，他們進行計算所依據(jù)的假設(shè)是完全錯誤的。除此之外，幾乎沒有人為如下事實規(guī)劃，即這將讓沒有深刻改革的政府逐漸破產(chǎn)——我的猜測是所有政府。他們也沒有為政府明顯會采取的下一步未雨綢繆：資金緊張的政府將考慮尋求其他人資本的幫助。

If we do enter a new age of the long-lived, it will probably be less an age of the happy rentier than the very heavily taxed rentier. If you don’t want to spend your 11th decade wishing that longevity science had never become a thing, think of what you once thought you should save for your retirement and triple it. Golden years? Working years.

如果我們的確進入了長壽的新時代，那也可能是對食利者(rentier)征收重稅的時代，而不是讓食利者感到高興的時代。如果你不想在上了100歲的時候希望長壽科學(xué)永遠不要有成果，那么想想你曾經(jīng)考慮為退休儲蓄的錢，然后積攢三倍的錢。黃金歲月?那是工作時期。

The writer is editor-in-chief of Money Week

本文作者是《Money Week》總編