Saloni Dattani
Researcher at Our World in Data with a PhD in psychiatric genetics, and founding editor of Works in Progress. Writes Scientific Discovery, a newsletter on medical research and long-run trends in health and mortality.
Saloni Dattani did not write this page.
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Their wordsI think we're at a point of divergence when it comes to medical innovation. Our tools are improving rapidly, but our ambitions to use them have fallen behind.
- 8 months earlier
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Their wordsPeople often describe innovation as a set of specific, sporadic breakthroughs that happen by pure chance or sheer determination, but it's really much more of a continuous stream every year, like the ones I've described here.
↗Medical breakthroughs in 2025scientificdiscovery.dev 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsThat stream can be sped up or slowed down by policy, funding, and institutional choices; and real progress - providing the fruits of that innovation to people who need them - takes a huge number of people and institutions working together.
↗Medical breakthroughs in 2025scientificdiscovery.dev 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Our reading
The best days of medicine are still ahead, but only if people choose to make them happen.
Their wordsI still think the best days of medicine are ahead of us, but only if we choose to make them happen.
↗Medical breakthroughs in 2025scientificdiscovery.dev 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 3 weeks earlier
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Their wordsI think it's quite common for people to want to become more widely read and less common for people to think about how to deal with the responsibility it comes with.
↗Saloni's guide to data visualizationscientificdiscovery.dev 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsYour ideas can mislead other people. It's important to try to get things right and acknowledge your mistakes, especially when you have a larger audience.
↗Saloni's guide to data visualizationscientificdiscovery.dev 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsMy view on science communication is that most concepts can be understood by most people, if explained clearly, even if they don't have years of expertise or training in a field.
↗Saloni's guide to data visualizationscientificdiscovery.dev 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 8 months earlier
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Their wordsIn my view, without smoking, we probably would have seen cancer mortality decline much earlier.
↗The decline in cancer mortality is about much more than smokingscientificdiscovery.dev 1st of 2 in this piece
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Their wordsFinally, I’ll explain a deeper issue with the whole idea: we can’t neatly divide the causes of an outcome into slices that add up to 100%.
↗The decline in cancer mortality is about much more than smokingscientificdiscovery.dev 2nd of 2 in this piece
- 16 months earlier
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Their wordsLife expectancy isn’t a prediction of how long people will live.
↗Seven things you didn't know about life expectancyscientificdiscovery.dev 1st of 6 in this piece
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Our reading
Every age of life is less deadly than it was for the generation before, not just childhood.
Their wordsEach age of our lives is less deadly than it was for previous generations.
↗Seven things you didn't know about life expectancyscientificdiscovery.dev 2nd of 6 in this piece
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Their wordsBut women actually tend to live longer than men because they have lower death rates across their lifespans, which you can see in the chart below.
↗Seven things you didn't know about life expectancyscientificdiscovery.dev 3rd of 6 in this piece
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Their wordsMany other predictions have already been broken, as life expectancy has continued to rise.
↗Seven things you didn't know about life expectancyscientificdiscovery.dev 4th of 6 in this piece
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Their wordsTo me, one of them is that longevity isn’t one obscure problem that needs to be ‘cracked’ in order for us to live longer.
↗Seven things you didn't know about life expectancyscientificdiscovery.dev 5th of 6 in this piece
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Their wordsNone of these trends are a given.
↗Seven things you didn't know about life expectancyscientificdiscovery.dev 6th of 6 in this piece
- 7 months earlier
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Their wordsI think we don’t have to imagine what a future could look like without this immense loss.
↗What does it mean when fewer people die?scientificdiscovery.dev