The Life Project by Helen Pearson review – lives begun in hardship just get harder

Workers suffer more stress than their bosses and wealthy children do better at school – the deep social truths uncovered by cradle-to-grave studies

“Wanted: 80,000 British babies for massive study”, said the headline on an article in Nature magazine, almost exactly a year ago. The Life Study – as the project was called – had been promised almost £30m from the government’s Large Facilities Capital Fund, which usually pays for particle accelerators and Antarctic research stations. The plan was for it to follow its subjects “from cradle to grave”. Children would be interviewed, logged, examined as they grew to adulthood. Blood, stool, umbilicus and placenta would be sampled, and perhaps teeth and toenail clippings too. Data would be mined for decades for associations between environmental factors and diseases. Public health in 21st century Britain was set to have the richest evidence base in the world.

The author of the article, Helen Pearson, first became interested in birth cohort studies in 2011, when she published a longer piece, also in Nature, about an earlier British study, the National Survey of Health and Development, which has been tracking the lives of 5,362 people since their birth in 1946. The NSHD, Pearson discovered, is now the longest running birth cohort study in the world, and the first of “an amazing collection” of five such studies – fresh cohorts were established in 1958, 1970, 1991, 2000, and “no other country has anything like it”. She’d write a book about them, she thought, timing publication to coincide with the 70th birthday of the 1946ers and the launch of the Life Study, which would be cohort six. But then, “due to serious challenges encountered in recruiting participants”, the Life Study lost its funding.

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