The Life Scientific: Sarah Harper

Discovery

BBC

Science, Technology

4.3 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 15 January 2024

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

People around the world are living longer and, on the whole, having fewer children. What does this mean for future populations? Sarah Harper CBE, Professor in Gerontology at the University of Oxford, tells presenter Jim Al-Khalili how it could affect pensions, why it might mean we work for longer, and discusses the ways modern life is changing global attitudes to when we have children, and whether we have them at all. Fertility and ageing have been Sarah's life's work and she tells her story of giving up a career in the media to carry out in-depth research, and going on to study population change in the UK and China, setting up the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing and later becoming a Scientific Advisor to UK Government.

Presenter: Jim Al-Khalili Producer: Tom Bonnett Production Co-ordinator: Jonathan Harris

Transcript

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0:45.6	podcasts.
0:48.6	Hello, my guest today began thinking about aging and retirement when she was still in
0:55.8	her 20s, not because she was about to stop working, quite the contrary. She was at
1:00.3	the beginning of what would become her life's work to understand the ways in which
1:04.5	our increasing life expectancy was changing the world.
1:08.8	Professor Sarah Harper runs the Institute of Population Aging at Oxford University and is a global
1:14.0	authority on how health care, housing, infrastructure, migration, almost all
1:19.0	aspects of society will need to adapt to us living for longer.
1:23.0	Societal changes also affect how many babies are born
	...

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