Peter Gallagher

While there is so lit­tle activ­ity on trade agree­ments or nego­ti­a­tions and only promises of inno­va­tion in trade pol­icy, I’ve been pay­ing closer atten­tion to other things. Demog­ra­phy, of course, and in this case epidemiology.

It took twenty thou­sand cen­turies for life-expectancy to dou­ble. But it grew by as much again in just one cen­tury in Aus­tralia. Sur­vival accel­er­ated due to changes in the way we live. Longer, health­ier lives in the future, how­ever, will depend on changes to the way we age. There can­not be, a ‘longevity gene’; what­ever favours longer life has some other pur­pose, so manip­u­la­tion of the com­plex cel­lu­lar mech­a­nisms that appear to reg­u­late age­ing car­ries col­lat­eral risk. Any advances are still only on the hori­zon of genet­ics and biol­ogy. But it seems cer­tain the demand is there, dri­ven by the enor­mous, mostly hid­den, eco­nomic value of longevity, which is ris­ing rapidly among the new global mid­dle classes in China and India.