Longevity of Fellows of the Royal Society

In my last article I showed how Fellows of the Royal Society born around 1870 lived about 4 years longer than the man in the street who had reached the age of 50. That finding is not new. In 1925 Sir Arthur Schuster, in connexion with the size of the fellowship with various rates of annual admission, calculated that Fellows lived 6 years longer on average. He used life tables published in Whitaker’s Almanack in the 1920s to reach that conclusion. Demographers have also used longevity data for Fellows to compare them with national academies in other European countries.

Sir Arthur Schuster (1851-1934)
He died aged 83

In some countries, no difference was found in the 19th and early 20th centuries but as the 20th century progressed, differences became evident and increased. Other countries did show a difference in longevity for members born in the 19th century, i.e. they were like the Royal Society; the French Académie des sciences resembled London. Where there was no discernible difference in longevity between members and the general public (Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, for example), a difference did become evident as time progressed and that difference has continued to increase especially since the 1950s. One major study of the Royal Society and the Russian Academy of Sciences published in 2011 concluded that since the 1980s, life expectancy in the Royal Society has been higher than the maximum life expectancy (for those reaching the age of 50) among all high-income countries.

I am not sure that latter conclusion is still justified. I calculated the median age at death for the cohort of Fellows of the Royal Society born between 1920 and 1930. (I know some of that cohort are not dead yet but it is possible to find the median once over half of the cohort has died.) 82 was the median age of death. If one then compares that with UK life tables compiled by the Office for National Statistics between 1980 and 2020, the median age of death from those reaching the age of 50 has been steadily increasing from 74 (rounded years) in 1980-82, 75 in 1990-92, 78 in 2000-2002, 81 in 2009-2011 and 81 in 2018-2020. Since the cohort born in 1920-1930 would have reached 75 in 2000, my best guess is that an advantage of 4-6 years (i.e. similar to that I found for those born around 1870 and that calculated by Schuster in the 1920s.

Data from the fellowship of the Royal Society will prove interesting over the next few years since by then the impact, if any, of the Education Act of 1944 will have become evident. Free Grammar Schools followed by free university education has produced many Fellows from those born in Britain after the mid-1930s in circumstances very different from those who reached the top of their professions in earlier times. A ‘natural experiment’ is in the offing to see if a good start in life, even before birth, is an important factor.

Interpretation of data showing a difference in longevity between one particular group (the Generals of the First World War, Fellows of the Royal College of Physicians and Fellows of the Royal Society, as discussed in these articles, for example) compared with the population as a whole will continue to provoke discussion and argument on the cause or causes of the association. Caution though is necessary since it is one of those topics where political conviction rather than firm evidence often looms large.

One similar but possibly different group I have seen no data on longevity for is the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE). The Society is more broadly based than science. In addition, there was a tradition that the ‘lad o' pairts’ in the village school would receive a university education supported by a bursary. The RSE therefore had a mixed, by social origins, fellowship earlier than academies in other countries and regions. One example I often quote is Sir Thomas Symington FRSE (1915-2007), son of an Ayrshire miner who died in the flu epidemic of 1918, who became Professor of Pathology in Glasgow and then Director of the Chester Beatty Cancer Research Institute in London. Tom played golf well into his 80s (a handicap of 15 when he was 87) and had a locker close to mine in the clubhouse. On meeting while changing, we both realised that was perhaps the first and only time the function of the human fetal adrenal had been discussed in that location.

Extracting the relevant data on the longevity of the fellowship of the RSE might proved informative. I am tempted to do it if we get a miserable spell of Ayrshire winter weather or, maybe, another pandemic.

In case my fellow Fellows of both societies become too excited at the prospect of immortality, I should say that while we might or might not reach or exceed the median longevity for the male population as a whole, the maximum lifespan remains unchanged.

Andreev EM, Jdanov D, Shkolnikov VM, Leon DA. 2011. Long-term trends in the longevity of scientific elites: evidence from the British and the Russian academies of science. Population Studies 65, 319-334 doi.org/10.1080/00324728.2011.603428

Winkler-Dworak M, Kaden H. 2013. The longevity of academicians: evidence from the Saxonian Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig. Vienna Institute of Demography Working Papers, No. 3/2013, Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), Vienna Institute of Demography, Vienna .

Schuster A. 1925. On the life statistics of Fellows of the Royal Society. Proceedings of the Royal Society A 107, 368-376.