Aging in America - Lawrence R. Samuel

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the scientists told Cronkite, as would germ-free “life islands.” By enclosing hospital beds in plastic packages, patients would be protected from infection, a not uncommon cause of death.9

      Saving lives through such interventions would of course extend longevity but did not directly address the actual aging process. Slowing or stopping the body from getting older in a biological sense required something truly miraculous, but that did not prevent scientists and physicians from trying to make such an amazing discovery. Like today, many medications designed to treat a particular condition were considered to also possibly have antiaging properties, each one (briefly) entertained as perhaps the much sought after wonder drug. One such drug was sodium warfarin, which was commonly used to keep blood from clotting in veins and arteries. After prescribing that medication to a number of older people, a physician, Arthur G. Walsh, noticed that his patients’ mental and physical conditions improved, cause enough for him to report his findings in a 1969 issue of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. The narrowing and hardening of arteries in the brain played a significant part in the aging process, Walsh proposed, meaning anticlotting drugs like sodium warfarin might be a way to dramatically extend the human life span.10 Although in hindsight this could be seen as much too big of a leap to make based on the limited evidence, it was a prime example of the race to find a cure for aging muddying scientists’ normally clear thinking.

      With aging now a highly visible issue, notable scientists from around the world made their voices heard on the subject. One of the leading advocates of antiaging in the late 1960s and early 1970s was the British scientist and physician Alex Comfort. Just a year before he published his hugely successful Joy of Sex, in fact, Comfort was considered in academic circles quite the expert on aging. While he often served as a much needed voice of reason, Comfort did firmly believe that scientists would soon figure out a way to extend the human life span by another fifteen years. (He had actually been researching and writing about aging since the early 1950s and was the author of a pair of books on the subject, Aging: The Biology of Senescence and The Process of Aging.) Over the past century, he explained in a 1971 issue of the scientific journal Impact of Science on Society, great strides had been made in preventing premature death. Little or no progress had been made in getting already old people to live longer; this was the next logical frontier. The “clock” of aging needed to be first found and then adjusted, Comfort proposed, with scientists’ determination to do just that increasing over the previous few decades. Extending the lives of mice through calorie reduction had already been achieved, he pointed out, making this approach the sensible one to explore with humans. Science would solve the aging problem before it found a cure for cancer, he felt, although preventing aging could very well lead to preventing cancer.11

      While as knowledgeable as anyone about aging, Comfort freely admitted how little scientists like him really knew about the process. Aging was “the curious property that makes us more likely to die the older we become,” he wrote in 1972, as vague a definition as one could put forth. Eliminating some causes of premature death was a piece of cake compared to extending the human life span beyond a hundred years old, he explained; it was becoming increasingly apparent that science had hit a kind of biological wall that prevented this next leap. But space travel too had until recently been just a farfetched dream, a good way of justifying all the effort that was going into what seemed like the stuff of science fiction. The most challenging piece of the puzzle would be to increase the average human life span without lengthening the period of old age, something that even the most ardent of antiagers admitted would test the limits of science. Modern medicine (and, even more so, public health measures) had already added a few decades of old age to the human life span, and the consensus was that tacking on a few more decades was a very unpalatable prospect indeed.12

       A Bad Press

      The aggressive effort to discover the cause of aging and then try to delay it as much as possible was directly correlated with the rise of youth culture in the late 1960s. Younger people in America gained social status at the expense of older people during the counterculture years, a fact that did not go unnoticed by leading gerontologists of the time. “How much youth fixation can a culture allow?” asked Bernard Coughlin in 1969, his question perhaps influenced by the media frenzy surrounding the recent Woodstock Festival. Coughlin, dean of the St. Louis University School of Social Services, was attending the International Congress of Gerontology, a group of researchers from forty nations who studied some aspect of aging. (Practicing gerontologists had little interest in the scientific effort to extend the human life span; rather, they focused on improving the lives of people in their later years.) Some kind of “generation gap” could be expected in any society, Coughlin noted, but the current one in the United States was excessive. Youth was being overvalued and age undervalued, he felt, keenly recognizing the historic shift that was taking place. Another attendee at the conference, Walter Walker of the University of Chicago, argued that older people in the country now made up a “minority group,” their social status analogous to that of people of color and other oppressed groups. Unlike African Americans, women, and even farmworkers, however, seniors had no movement to support their civil rights, reason enough for Walker to urge them to organize in order to gain political and economic power.13

      Walker’s wishes were answered the following year in Philadelphia with the formation of the Gray Panthers. The mission of the organization (whose name was inspired by the militant Black Panthers) was to dispel stereotypes about older people and to influence legislature affecting them. There were about eight thousand Gray Panthers in the United States by the nation’s Bicentennial, each member committed to fighting prejudice against older people and to bringing attention to their cause. Activism centered around the “three H’s”—health, hunger, and housing—with much of it directed at the Ford administration’s budget cutting as it dismantled a good part of LBJ’s Great Society programs.14 The so-called medi-gap in health insurance was a particular problem, with Medicare covering fewer medical expenses than when the program began a decade earlier.

      The marginalization of older Americans could be seen as the result of many different factors. One was the medical approach of treating aging as if it were a disease, popularizing the idea that all older people were somehow chronically ill. Such a view helped to turn age into a social problem, and served as a wellspring of negative attitudes toward anyone who was not categorized as young (again, typically less than thirty years old). Carl Eisdorfer, a psychiatrist at Duke University, which had a major gerontology center as part of its medical school, believed older people were generally seen as an ecological problem, like no deposit, no return bottles, accounting for why they were considered disposable. Instead, he proposed in 1971, the twenty million Americans over sixty-five could and should be “recycled” rather than simply be discarded. Eisdorfer went further, arguing that the nation’s universities should reinvent themselves from being degree-granting institutions for young people into resources offering lifelong education for all (still a good idea, I believe). Contrary to popular belief, research showed that older people were capable of learning new things, and did not deserve to be thrown onto a kind of trash heap as soon as they reached retirement age.15 Some textbooks included charts indicating how intelligence declined with age, however—which was completely wrong information given recent studies showing otherwise.16

      Indeed, a study published in Psychology Today that same year did suggest that older folks could be recycled. Two collaborating psychologists, Robert Kastenbaum of Wayne State and Bernice Neugarten, now at the University of Southern California, studied two thousand people between seventy and seventy-nine years old and found that many of the widely held beliefs about this age group were untrue. The majority of these septuagenarians were mentally competent, adaptable, and active, Kastenbaum and Neugarten reported, not at all the senile oldsters living lives of quiet desperation that many would have expected. Most surprising, perhaps, many of those in the study were sexually active, even more so than when they were younger. (Retirement communities and nursing homes were and remain ideal settings for residents to hook up. It was not unusual, however, for residents in nursing homes to be scolded for making sexual advances toward someone of a similar age; the younger employees considered it unnatural or, perhaps, potentially harmful.) Kastenbaum and Neugarten’s group also tended to be quite liberal in their views, dispelling the myth about

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