Olshansky S J
School of Public Health, University of Illinois at Chicago and Center on Aging, The University of Chicago, Chicago, USA.
J Comp Pathol. 2010 Jan;142 Suppl 1:S4-9. doi: 10.1016/j.jcpa.2009.10.016. Epub 2009 Dec 1.
In 1825 the British actuary Benjamin Gompertz believed he had discovered a consistency in the timing of death in people that was so important that he labelled his observation a 'law of mortality'. To Gompertz, this 'law' was equivalent in importance to Newton's law of gravity because he believed it would be observed in all living things. Gompertz's quest for the 'law' eventually failed, as did similar efforts by other scientists in the 19th and most of the 20th century. However, the search for the law of mortality was successfully resolved in 1996 when my colleagues and I discovered that the only way to 'see' Gompertz's law expressed as common age patterns of death across species was to partition total mortality into its intrinsic and extrinsic components, and examine mortality schedules on a uniform time scale. Scientists had been unable to reveal the law of mortality in the past not only because they could not partition total mortality, but also because of the previous anthropocentric perspective that forced some scientists to view duration of life along a single time scale - one based on human measurements of chronological time. The law of mortality is relevant today not only because it links the epidemiology of disease, ageing and death across species, but because it creates a window into the future for those who study disease epidemiology in animals that now live long enough in protected environments to experience the biological consequences of ageing. In this paper I summarize the historical search for the law of mortality, explain why the solution could only be found by linking two seemingly unconnected scientific disciplines (evolution biology and actuarial/demographics), explain why age patterns of disease and death in humans may be used to understand and predict disease epidemiology in other species, and describe how a new scientific discipline has arisen in the modern era as a result of this research.
1825年，英国精算师本杰明·冈珀茨认为自己发现了人类死亡时间上的一种一致性，这种一致性非常重要，以至于他将自己的观察结果称为“死亡率定律”。对冈珀茨来说，这条“定律”在重要性上等同于牛顿的万有引力定律，因为他相信它适用于所有生物。冈珀茨对这条“定律”的探索最终失败了，19世纪以及20世纪大部分时间里其他科学家的类似努力也同样失败了。然而，死亡率定律的探索在1996年成功解决了，当时我和我的同事发现，要“看到”以跨物种常见死亡年龄模式呈现的冈珀茨定律，唯一的方法是将总死亡率分解为其内在和外在组成部分，并在统一的时间尺度上检查死亡率时间表。过去科学家们之所以无法揭示死亡率定律，不仅是因为他们无法划分总死亡率，还因为之前以人类为中心的观点迫使一些科学家沿着单一的时间尺度来看待生命时长——这是一个基于人类对实足年龄测量的时间尺度。死亡率定律在今天之所以重要，不仅是因为它将疾病、衰老和死亡的流行病学联系起来，还因为它为那些研究动物疾病流行病学的人打开了一扇通向未来的窗口，这些动物现在在受保护的环境中活得足够长，能够体验到衰老的生物学后果。在本文中，我总结了对死亡率定律的历史探索，解释了为什么只有通过将两个看似不相关的科学学科（进化生物学和精算学/人口统计学）联系起来才能找到解决方案，解释了为什么人类疾病和死亡的年龄模式可用于理解和预测其他物种的疾病流行病学，并描述了由于这项研究在现代如何产生了一门新的科学学科。
