Aging in America. Lawrence R. Samuel

at the cellular level, it should be possible to extend the human life span 200 or 300 years or indefinitely,” he claimed, more concerned about the moral implications of a nation of Methuselahs than the obstacles to achieving such a thing.⁶¹ Scientists at the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore also pegged two hundred years as a reachable goal, possibly via a vaccination much like the vaccinations used to prevent diseases. “Doubling the lifespan potential is a reasonable objective from what we know now,” said Richard G. Cutler of the institute in 1978, envisioning injecting people with an “aging cocktail” to fool the body into repairing damage to cells’ genetic material.⁶²

      For Richardson and others, the symptoms of getting older had been addressed through medicine, but science had yet to confront aging itself; this was the much bigger opportunity and challenge.⁶³ Although no breakthrough had yet come to pass, journalists consistently presented scientists as being hot on the trail of aging, with something big expected soon. “Aging Reversal Is Called Near,” declared a headline in the Atlanta Constitution in 1976 based on some findings reported by Johan Bjorksten. Bjorksten was positively brash in describing his research, calling a news conference at the American Chemical Society to announce what he had found so far. “I’m not interested in gaining five years here and five years there,” he puffed, proud to say that he was “shooting for the whole pot.” For Bjorksten, the “whole pot” was nothing less than an average life expectancy of eight hundred years, with a yet to be discovered enzyme to be the ace up his sleeve. Other chemists were confident the enzyme would soon be identified. With intensive research, “I think we could have the thing done in 5 to 10 years,” agreed Rolf Martin of City University of New York, quite assured that science was on the brink of realizing what many would consider its greatest achievement.⁶⁴

       A Quietly Ticking Social Time Bomb

      Lost in the scientific pursuit to add many years to human life was the fact that those intimately involved in the lives of older people already had their hands quite full. Gerontology, a field that had been around in some form since the turn of the century, was booming in the late 1970s as America’s population became noticeably older due to both demographics and life extension. It was the future, however, that presented abundant opportunities for those considering careers in gerontology. There were about 32.7 million Americans older than sixty in 1977 (15 percent of the population), while demographers were forecasting that 41.9 million citizens would fall into that age category in the year 2000 (16 percent of the population). (Their forecast turned out to be spot on, although that number represented about 17 percent of the population.) Many social workers were already switching their emphasis from children to seniors, taking courses in gerontology to take advantage of the expanding field. Hospital administrators, registered nurses, and government employees were also equipping themselves with the educational tools to work with older people, fully aware that both social and economic factors were on their side. At the New School in New York City, for example, about one hundred students were pursuing a master’s degree in gerontological services, a program that covered virtually every aspect of aging. Duke University, the University of Michigan, and Columbia University also offered programs in gerontology, with many other colleges planning to do so soon.⁶⁵

      The leading school in gerontology, however, was arguably the University of Southern California. Since 1973, the university’s Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center had focused on the problems of the elderly and was serving as the prototype for other institutions interested in starting up their own research facilities. (Andrus, a retired school principal, founded AARP in Los Angeles.) For James E. Birren, founding director of the center, the work completed to date in aging was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, with much more research to be done as additional problems were identified. Given how older Americans were viewed and treated, it made perfect sense that the nation’s top institution in gerontology subscribed to the idea that aging represented a “problem.” All kinds of professionals—sociologists, biologists, psychologists, urban planners, social workers, nurses, hospital and nursing home administrators, and even architects—were required to take care of older members of society, Birren rather condescendingly pointed out, with many more to be needed in the next few decades. “Gerontology is an embryonic field,” agreed Ruth Weg, associate director of training at the center, calling on the federal government to support institutions like hers as the nation’s population aged.⁶⁶

      One need not have been an expert to know that the nation would likely have some kind of crisis in half a century or so when baby boomers entered their senior years en masse. Carl Eisdorfer, the Duke psychiatrist who had become the president of the General Services Administration by the nation’s Bicentennial, called aging “a time bomb” as he looked ahead to the not-too-distant future. Just the next decade and a half was cause for considerable concern given the expected numbers: the sixty-five-plus demographic was forecast to almost double over the next fourteen years, from twenty million in 1976 to 38 million in 1990. With this many older people in America, Eisdorfer saw two major problems—mandatory retirement at age sixty-five and stereotyping of seniors—that would make this bomb explode if was not defused. Allowing seniors to remain productive by working would be a big help, his research showed, and not separating them from the rest of the population would be of considerable psychological benefit. More generally, treating older people like “old people” actually accelerated the aging process, good reason for him to encourage the rest of the population to try to resist categorizing them into some special group.⁶⁷

      The metaphor of a looming demographic explosion gained traction in the late seventies. “A quietly ticking social time bomb—America’s rapidly aging population—is due to explode in 20 years or so with potentially revolutionary impact on the nation’s economy,” warned Philip Shabecoff in the New York Times in 1978. Little had been done to prepare the country for this “future shock,” Shabecoff reported, although the Senate Special Committee on Aging was beginning to consider what, if anything, the federal government could do about it. The slower economic growth of the past decade, as well as other factors, such as inflation, a jump in early retirement, and a greater demand for health care, only added to the foreseeable problem. Science had yet to lengthen the human life span to a century plus, despite all the efforts to do so, but biomedical advances were dramatically increasing the number of Americans living to be eighty years old or more. Some fifty-five million people, almost one-fifth of the nation’s population, would be sixty-five years old or older by 2030, Joseph A. Califano Jr., secretary of HEW, told the Senate committee, the baby boom gradually turning into the “senior boom.” Where would the money to take care of all these older people come from? Califano asked the senators, the fact that all this doom and gloom was still a half century away not offering much consolation.⁶⁸ As America entered the 1980s, the subject of aging intensified, as did the conversation that, whether we liked it or not, we were all constantly getting older.

      2

      The De-Aging of America

      Chronological age is not a reliable indicator of the

      ability of a person to function.

      We need to find measures that predict aging better than

      a person’s birth certificate.

      —John W. Rowe, Harvard University, 1985

      On the morning of June 26, 1983, the Clinique consultants at Rich’s department store in Atlanta were delighted to find the new line of products that had just come in. Clinique, the high-end skin care marketer, was launching a program called “Daily De-Aging at Any Age,” which the store’s wealthier customers were bound to find very appealing. Clinique’s dermatologists had reportedly determined that “older skin needs more aggressive exfoliation,” good news for the company given the number of products that were said to be required to remove the dead skin cells. Consumers likely to subscribe to Clinique’s “Daily De-Aging at Any Age” regimen—most of them middle-aged women—would start with a “scrub cream” to soften wrinkles and rekindle glow, after which would follow a twice-a-day application of various soaps, lotions, and moisturizers. Included in the program