Senescence, Growth, and Gerontology in the United States

Abstract

This paper discusses how growth and aging became interrelated phenomena with the creation of gerontology in the United States. I first show that the relation of growth to senescence, which had hardly attracted scientific attention before the twentieth century, started to be investigated by several experimental scientists around the 1900s. Subsequently, research on the connection between the two phenomena entered a new domain through the birth of gerontology as a scientific field comprised of various disciplines, many of which addressed growth. Due to gerontologists' efforts, the association between aging and growth became stronger and more multifaceted within the discursive and organizational matrix constituting the new science, leading to a broader definition of senescence with an ambiguous connection to chronological age. Furthermore, as gerontologists borrowed the cultural agendas as well as research methods from studies of growth, aging began to be defined as a phenomenon that could be actively controlled and managed in both social arenas and laboratory environments.

De-standardising ageing? Shifting regimes of age measurement

“…The overall project combines interview, archival and documentary material. The empirical sections of this paper draw mainly from the historical documentary data-set, which contains approximately 4,000 references published between 1935 – the year marking the establishment of modern gerontology (Park 2008) – and 2013. This data-set was constructed through searches on electronic bibliographic databases (Web of Science, PubMed, JSTOR) for the keywords ‘measurement of age’, ‘biological age’, ‘functional age’, ‘biological age’, ‘biomarkers of ageing’ and ‘measurement of senescence’.…”

“…Concerned with the social and political consequences of the Great Depression, Cowdry had, in 1935, gathered together a group of experts for a conference under the auspices of the Macy Foundation and its director Lawrence Frank, which he later published as Problems of Ageing (Cowdry 1939). In this forum, he was able, drawing on the ideas of Nobel Prize-winning surgeon and eugenist Alexis Carrel (1912), to propose that the rate of ageing in tissues was determined by their surrounding environment of nutrients, regardless of the organism's CA (Park 2013). This explained why, …the burden of years is not evenly felt by blood vessels of all sorts.…”

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 ). 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 ). 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.…”