
Sign up to save your podcasts
Or


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
By BBC World Service4.4
933933 ratings
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

7,708 Listeners

1,040 Listeners

5,541 Listeners

1,810 Listeners

1,884 Listeners

726 Listeners

1,827 Listeners

1,056 Listeners

2,021 Listeners

614 Listeners

762 Listeners

94 Listeners

433 Listeners

415 Listeners

819 Listeners

739 Listeners

248 Listeners

354 Listeners

353 Listeners

475 Listeners

242 Listeners

3,155 Listeners

110 Listeners

1,636 Listeners