Want a booster shot of knowledge? David Olusoga and Steven Johnson’s new show will teach you about the magic, and the horrors, behind the medical breakthroughs of our time
In 1900, the average global life expectancy was 32. Today, a tiny blink of historical time later, it’s twice that. In a developed country, you will most likely live to see your grandchildren and can hope not unreasonably to see a great-grandson or daughter, too. The new four-part series Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer (BBC Four), presented by historian David Olusoga and US science writer Steven Johnson, explores how a handful of medical breakthroughs got us from there to here.
The first episode – naturally enough in the age of Covid – focused on the revolutionary power of vaccines. They are part of what Johnson called the “invisible shield” of public health progress, programmes and policies that we, until early last year, could take for granted. He and Olusoga, talking via Zoom, took it in turns to explain first the precursor to vaccination, variolation (the ancient practice of smearing infected matter from a smallpox sufferer into a cut in the flesh of a healthy person, to protect him or her from the disease’s worst ravages), and then the development of vaccines. The speed with which humanity moved from Edward Jenner’s linking of milkmaids’ apparent immunity to smallpox via cowpox infection to producing effective vaccines for a novel zoonotic virus mere months after it emerged, to say nothing of producing and distributing them on an extraordinary scale, was breathtaking.
