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Abstract
National science academies represent intellectual elites and vanguard groups in the achievement of longevity. We estimated life expectancy (LE) at age 50 of members of the British Royal Society (RS) for the years 1670–2007 and of members of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) for the years 1750–2006. The longevity of academicians was higher than that of their corresponding national populations, with the gap widening from the 1950s. Since the 1980s, LE in the RS has been higher than the maximum LE among all high-income countries. In each period, LE in the RS was greater than in the RAS, although since the 1950s it has risen in parallel in the two academies. This steep increase shared by academicians in Britain and Russia suggests that general populations have the potential for a substantial increase in survival to high ages.
Notes
1. Evgeny M. Andreev, Dmitri Jdanov, and Vladimir M. Shkolnikov are at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Konrad-Zuse Strasse 1, Rostock 18057, Germany. E - mail: [email protected]. David Leon is at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
2. This work is a part of the Vanguard project of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. We are grateful to Professor Gustav Feichtinger from the Vienna Institute of Demography (VID), who inspired our interest in the theme and invited us to attend the workshop ‘Age Dynamics of Learned Societies: A Comparative Study of National Academies of Sciences’ held in Vienna on 28–29 November 2006. We are also grateful to Alexia Fuernkrantz-Prskawetz and Maria Winkler-Dworak of Vienna Institute of Demography for useful discussions on preliminary results. We are very grateful to Professor Tom Meade FRS for his help and advice and Mr David Silverthorne of the RS who prepared for us an anonymized list of current RS fellows.