ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2015
Deciphering death: a commentary on Gompertz (1825) 'On the nature of the function expressive of the law of human mortality, and on a new mode of determining the value of life contingencies'.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 632 papers.
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632 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Strong inhibition of insulin/IGF-1 signaling in early-mid adulthood compresses morbidity, but in later life accelerates aging.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- The rhythm of aging: Stability and drift in the individual rate of senescence.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Slowed Gompertzian ageing in long-lived C. elegans results from expansion of decrepitude, not decelerated ageing.Nature communications · 2026Article
- SPrUCE: Utilizing Ultraconserved Elements of DNA for Population-Level Genetic Diversity Estimation.Molecular ecology resources · 2026Article
- Why we age.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Simulating Cancer Recurrence Patterns From Post-Treatment Viable Tumor Burden Distributions.JCO clinical cancer informatics · 2026Article
- Revisiting the social frailty index in aging adults: relevance and implications for an emerging construct.GeroScience · 2026Article
- Mono- and Polyauxic Growth Kinetics: A Semi-Mechanistic Framework for Complex Biological Dynamics.Bulletin of mathematical biology · 2026Article
- Maternal obesity decreases offspring lifespan.Molecular metabolism · 2026Article
- Evolution of Senescence by Damage Accumulation That Accelerates With Age Throughout an Organism's Lifespan.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
572 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Abstract
In 1825, the actuary Benjamin Gompertz read a paper, 'On the nature of the function expressive of the law of human mortality, and on a new mode of determining the value of life contingencies', to the Royal Society in which he showed that over much of the adult human lifespan, age-specific mortality rates increased in an exponential manner. Gompertz's work played an important role in shaping the emerging statistical science that underpins the pricing of life insurance and annuities. Latterly, as the subject of ageing itself became the focus of scientific study, the Gompertz model provided a powerful stimulus to examine the patterns of death across the life course not only in humans but also in a wide range of other organisms. The idea that the Gompertz model might constitute a fundamental 'law of mortality' has given way to the recognition that other patterns exist, not only across the species range but also in advanced old age. Nevertheless, Gompertz's way of representing the function expressive of the pattern of much of adult mortality retains considerable relevance for studying the factors that influence the intrinsic biology of ageing. This commentary was written to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
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