Edmund Vincent Cowdry and the Making of Gerontology as a Multidisciplinary Scientific Field in the United States

Abstract

The Canadian-American biologist Edmund Vincent Cowdry played an important role in the birth and development of the science of aging, gerontology. In particular, he contributed to the growth of gerontology as a multidisciplinary scientific field in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. With the support of the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, he organized the first scientific conference on aging at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where scientists from various fields gathered to discuss aging as a scientific research topic. He also edited Problems of Ageing (1939), the first handbook on the current state of aging research, to which specialists from diverse disciplines contributed. The authors of this book eventually formed the Gerontological Society in 1945 as a multidisciplinary scientific organization, and some of its members, under Cowdry's leadership, formed the International Association of Gerontology in 1950. This article historically traces this development by focusing on Cowdry's ideas and activities. I argue that the social and economic turmoil during the Great Depression along with Cowdry's training and experience as a biologist--cytologist in particular--and as a textbook editor became an important basis of his efforts to construct gerontology in this direction.

Unsettling Standards: The Biological Age Controversy

“…This resonated with the vision proposed by Vincent Cowdry, the main scientific instigator of the role of the Macy Foundation in sponsoring research into the “problems of the elderly.” As Park () has documented, Cowdry, a cytologist working at Washington University, was concerned with the divergence between differentiating physiological processes at the level of the cell and tissue, and the increasing typification of older people as “useless” on the basis of their CA. With Frank's assistance, in 1935, Cowdry gathered together a group of experts for a conference on aging, which can be seen as marking the establishment of modern gerontology (Park ) and the results of which he later published as Problems of Ageing (Cowdry ).…”

“…As Park (2008) has documented, Cowdry, a cytologist working at Washington University, was concerned with the divergence between differentiating physiological processes at the level of the cell and tissue, and the increasing typification of older people as "useless" on the basis of their CA. With Frank's assistance, in 1935, Cowdry gathered together a group of experts for a conference on aging, which can be seen as marking the establishment of modern gerontology (Park 2013) and the results of which he later published as Problems of Ageing (Cowdry 1939). In this forum, drawing on the ideas of Nobel Prize-winning physiologist and eugenist Alexis Carrel, Cowdry proposed that rate of aging in tissues was determined by their surrounding environment of nutrients, regardless of the organism's CA.…”

“…Focusing on physiological changes in adolescence, Shock was able to establish that the onset of a physiological event-menarche-was more important than CA in structuring changes in development. It was thus no coincidence that, when advising the federal government on the establishment of an intramural gerontology program at the National Institutes of Health, Frank recommended Shock as chief of the Gerontology Unit when the first chief, Edward Stieglitz, resigned for personal reasons in 1941 (Park 2013). There, during the 1940s, Shock was able to establish a program of research that drew on his experience in measuring "physiological age," now using institutionalized elderly subjects from the Baltimore Department of Public Welfare.…”

Ageing between Gerontology and Biomedicine

“…We document the multiple attempts to forge a relationship between the biology of ageing, medicine and society from the 1950s onwards and how those were ultimately incorporated in biomedicine through an emphasis on the pathologies of old age rather than on ageing as a biological phenomenon. Given the aims of our paper, we are less interested in providing insights into the origins of research into the biology of ageing (Achenbaum, 1995;Park, 2008) and are mostly concerned with understanding how, at a particular historical juncture, when the biology of ageing became a topic of interest to various philanthropic institutions and the State, different epistemic projects were articulated and transformed.…”

Back to the future? Transatlantic collaboration on ageing research

“…In fact, it the first intent of some of the founders of our field was to create just such a research community. In 1939, Vladimir Korenchevsky, founder of the British Society for Research on Ageing, encouraged a number of prominent American scientists closely interested in problems of ageing (including Edmund Cowdrey and Edward Stieglitz) to form the "the American branch" of the BSRA (known then as the "Club for Ageing") (Park 2008). We now know this 'American Branch' as the Gerontological Society of America.…”