Lessons from the longest study on human development

My TED talk grew out of a book that I wrote about the incredible British birth cohort studies. The story starts in March 1946, when scientists began to track thousands of children born in one week. No one imagined that this would become the longest-running study of human development in the world, growing to encompass five generations of children. Today, they are some of the best-studied people on the planet, and the simple act of observing human life has changed the way we are born, schooled, parent and die. These studies have arguably touched the lives of almost every person in Britain today, yet they are one of our best-kept secrets. To my great surprise, the book was named best science book of the year by The Observer, was a book of the year for The Economist and was longlisted for the Orwell Prize.

If you can find an old copy of this book, it’s really worth reading. It tells the extraordinary early history and results of the ambitious 1946 maternity survey, led by Dr. James Douglas. An army of health visitors fanned out across Britain and interviewed 13,687 mothers, 91% of those who gave birth in one week in March 1946 in England, Wales and Scotland. The book offers a fascinating insight into what it was like to have a baby shortly after the Second World War – often at home, without pain relief and with just a midwife to help. The results revealed shocking inequality: working-class women received worse medical care and their babies were more likely to die. The findings were able to feed into the foundations of the National Health Service and improve maternity care for generations to come.

The website for each cohort study is a great starting point to learn more. They provide an overview of the studies, a more comprehensive bibliography and, in some cases, details of questionnaires and other data collected. They also give a flavor of the enormous breadth of these studies and feature the most recent publications.
1946 cohort: http://www.nshd.mrc.ac.uk/nshd/
1958, 1970 and Millennium cohorts: http://www.cls.ioe.ac.uk/Default.aspx
1991 cohort (ALSPAC): http://www.bristol.ac.uk/alspac/