“Ageism” refers to individual and societal stereotypes of persons as well as to the denigration of their assets and vulnerabilities on account of age. The age-based prejudice, which was coined in 1969, usually targets the old. Implicit and overt instances of age discrimination date back to ancient times. Modern-day investigators have reported that ageism permeates the marketplace, health care facilities, legal systems, large institutions, and ordinary discourse and intimate relations. Researchers report ageism's negative impact in developing and advanced-industrial societies. Along with racism and sexism, ageism is still permitted to fester in the United States.

“Spirituality is an abstract, sensitizing concept that refers to a region of human experience involving awareness of being and transcending a purely personal, self-centered viewpoint,” writes Robert C. Atchley in Spirituality and Aging. “Spiritual experience begins with basic spirituality, an unadorned sense of being. To this is added a sense of ‘I’ as perceiver and actor” (Atchley, 2009, p. 147). Atchley rightly claims that spirituality manifests itself in the Present, where a receptive “I” embraces both Transcendence and Immanence. Spirituality entails at once all-encompassing and intimate relationships with Ultimate Reality. Experienced in one present moment after another, spiritually inclined persons learn how to balance being and doing. Seekers sustain quests for authentic identities while they go about their business in the world. “Spirituality as the transformation and discovery of the self always happens in encounter … an activity constantly stirred up and sustained by the other who calls one out of one's self and into the truth of one's mission in life, out of provisionality and into the adventure of incarnation” (McIntosh, 1998, p. 6).

Younger and older seekers usually share certain spiritual traits, such as a history of religiosity and encounters with loss. In most instances, however, spiritual development typically ripens during the second half of life (Clark, 2005). Women and men over forty are the prime consumers and producers of spiritual retreats, workshops, websites, and literature. Promoting spirituality has become big business: Amazon in 2012 offered 132,000 books on spiritual transformation, and 62,000 more under its New Age category. The passage of years nonetheless does not invariably engender spiritual enlightenment. “Developing this capacity is mysterious in that not everyone perceives or accepts the invitation to spiritual consciousness,” notes Atchley, acknowledging aging's diverse patterns. “Yet by later life, a large majority of people are in touch with their inner life and can identify elements of their lives that they perceive to be spiritual” (Atchley, 2009, p. 148).

Writers invoke a variety of metaphors to characterize the mysterious, elusive contours of spirituality and aging. One set, focusing on human actors, highlights “spiritual growth” and “self discovery,” emphasizing the “mature imagination” of “sages” or “spiritual elders” (Biggs, 1999; Koenig, 1994; Moberg and Ellor, 2001; Schachter-Shalomi and Miller, 1995).

Shortly after their landmark 1937 conference, some Woods Hole participants formed a Club for Research on Ageing so they could pursue further possibilities for advancing a science of gerontology. Annual reunions were supported by the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation. Club members then decided that they had to publish a journal in order to disseminate their scientific ideas more widely. So in 1945, eleven days after the war in Europe ended, papers were filed in New York City to incorporate a Gerontological Society. Much of the “Certificate of Incorporation” was boilerplate, necessary to attain nonprofit status. This legal proceeding nonetheless constituted an intellectual investment whereby the Society's founders hoped to spread risks and dividends across disciplinary boundaries and professional domains:

This multidisciplinary enterprise was designed to attract a select group of scientific researchers interested in “problems of aging” and appeal to professionals whose work with the elderly gave them a practical stake in problem solving.

The Gerontological Society (GSA), the previous chapter showed, has had difficulty defining its multidisciplinary aims and developing modi operandi in ways not unduly constrained by the competing professional loyalties of its members. This chapter, which reconstructs the history of the University of Michigan's (U-M) Institute of Gerontology (IoG), illustrates how parochial academic interests can exercise a different set of pressures on centers based in universities. However, the increasing role that state and federal agencies have assumed in addressing the needs of older persons in the United States has created unprecedented opportunities for such centers to produce, disseminate, and apply gerontologic knowledge. These opportunities, in turn, have begun to call into question the purposes and organization of research in higher education.

For roughly a century, departments have represented the range of disciplinary interests on campus and have borne primary responsibility for undergraduate education. Free-standing multidisciplinary units, in contrast, are supposed to embody “diversity of scholarship … novelty and venture-someness, [and] imagination and creativity [that rely more upon] synthetic work and the development of new conceptual paradigms and unifying theories than upon specialization and fragmentation of knowledge.” Such grand claims notwithstanding, centers on aging actually are expected to survive on their wits. They rise or fall at the margins of the local academic community on their ability to obtain outside funds and extramural recognition. Intended to manage intellectual risks differently than departments, multidisciplinary centers have come to play important if still anomalous roles at research universities like Michigan.

The state has become a major source of funding for scientific knowledge in every advanced industrial nation. “In the Anglo-Saxon countries,” observes John Ziman, “it was customary for state support for basic research to be very limited, except in fields such as medicine and agriculture with direct connections to major sectors of governmental responsibility. This custom charged radically in and after the Second World War. Public funds soon became so vital to the advancement of science – especially the academic research carried out in universities and other higher education institutions – that they largely determined its direction and shape.”

We have already seen evidence of the increasing reliance upon federal support by gerontologists who tried to build institutions after 1939 to spur and sustain research on aging, especially in centers of higher education. Training grants from the U.S. Administration on Aging, (AoA) and various units of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) made it possible for faculty members and their students to create and disseminate new ideas about senescence and to develop fresh ways to deal with the problems and opportunities associated with late life. The Gerontological Society (GSA) moved from St. Louis to Washington, D.C., so that it could be closer to those who were deciding how to allocate research dollars and debating how much to invest in gerontology. No history of gerontology can stress enough the critical role played by the federal government in shaping the emergence of this scientific field of inquiry.

Just as there exist striking differences in orientation, scope, and longevity among gerontology programs based in universities, so too the uses made of research on aging by federal agencies vary greatly. As the previous chapter documents, there is no consistent pattern in the ways that the legislative and executive branches of the U.S. government sponsor, consume, and produce knowledge. The aims and impact of scientific work underwritten by public funds, which has exploded since the 1960s, have generally been targeted to particular constituencies for specific purposes. Fields and customers do not overlap greatly. Nor is there yet much centralized coordination of research activities – despite the efforts of the Federal Council on Aging, an assistant HHS secretary for aging, and several congressional oversight committees. Each unit tends to define its mission to older Americans its own way and to operate with considerable autonomy. Rarely by design do two or more federal agencies voice the same rank-order list of concerns for aging people and share the same research aims for an extended period of time. Interagency cooperation is as difficult to negotiate as it is to sustain interdisciplinary research teams.

Maintaining intra-agency consistency, as this chapter illustrates, is also a daunting challenge. With few exceptions, institutional memories in federal agencies with a mandate to address the needs of elderly Americans are not long. So as priorities change and staff move on, old issues are revisited as if for the first time.

The current state of the field

There never was a golden age in gerontology's past. “Gerontologists who have lived long enough to represent their subject matter will recall the days when our field was all but invisible within the panoply of established scientific disciplines,” recollects Robert Kastenbaum. “We often described ourselves as a—with a special interest in aging and the aged. (This blank would be filled variously by ‘psychologist,’ ‘biologist,’ ‘economist,’ etc.).” Still, many U.S. researchers in the early 1960s expressed high hopes for the field's future. Clark Tibbitts pointed out that “half our scientific knowledge has been gained since 1950.” Investigators were excited by the opportunities for combining basic and applied research on aging. As Leonard Cain put it, “This new and burgeoning field represents a peculiar amalgam of scientific research and reformist commitment with the attributes of a major social movement.” By the end of the decade, other prominent gerontologists spoke more guardedly. “In spite of the enormous increase in research output and in spite of our pride in the advancement of knowledge, superficially seen as the result of this increase,” declared two Gerontological Society (GSA) presidents, Carl Eisdorfer and Powell Lawton, “our concepts of research and theory have not advanced beyond viewpoints of the nineteenth century.”

Gerontology did not become a Big Science, but it grew more scientistic. “After a while,” continues Kastenbaum, “there were enough of us blankety-blanks to persuade at least each other that we now had something resembling a coherent field of research, service, and education.”

On october I, 1928, Aldred Scott Warthin, presented an influential lecture on “the pathology of the aging process” to the New York Academy of Medicine. The University of Michigan professor of pathology claimed that there were three stages (evolution, maturity, and involution) to the human “tragicomedy.” Next he detailed pathological conditions associated with growing older, especially those presenting themselves in the central nervous and cardiovascular systems. Warthin then assessed the wide array of theories about senescence competing for support in the 1920s. Some accentuated monocausal changes in pH or the accumulation of toxic wastes. Other models focused on the loss of function or decline in growth at the cellular level. According to Warthin, aging was primarily a physiological, not a pathological, process. Specific patterns of change varied from system to system, species to species. “Senescence is due primarily to the gradually weakening energy-charge set in action by the moment of fertilization.” Based on current evidence, Warthin doubted that bodily “decline” could be deferred much past age seventy-five. Contrary to the optimistic hopes of an earlier generation of scientists, chances for rejuvenescence thus far were impossible. The biological reality of enfeeblement presaged difficulties for society because the percentage of older people in the population was increasing.

Warthin's keynote lecture for the Academy's program on “the problem of aging and of old age” was billed as “an experiment in graduate medical service,” a venture planned “without previous experience.”

“How can we try to transform to a normal and physiological condition old age, at present utterly pathological, unless we first understand the most intimate details of its mechanism?” asked Elie Metchnikoff in The Nature of Man: Studies in Optimistic Philosophy (1908). “I think it is extremely probable that the scientific study of old age and of death, two branches of science that may be called gerontology and thanatology, will bring about great modifications in the course of the last period of life.” In these two sentences, the world-renowned director of the Pasteur Institute not only invited his contemporaries to engage in scientific research on aging, but he also coined a name for such a field of inquiry. Once investigators better understood basic structures, mechanisms, and processes, Metchnikoff hoped, the “utterly pathological” features of senescence could be modified. Scientific progress would be slow because there was so much to learn, but “faith must be in the power of science,” Metchnikoff acknowledged. “Our generation has no chance of attaining physiological old age and normal death; but it may take real consolation from the thought that those who are now young may advance several steps in that direction. It may reflect that each succeeding generation will get closer and closer to the solution and that true happiness one day will be reached by mankind.”

Crossing Frontiers argues that gerontology did not emerge as a scientific field of inquiry in the United States until the twentieth century. The field's subject matter – “the study of aging from the broadest perspective” – has deep, variegated roots. Scripture and classical literature attest to the “crown of glory” and other blessings that might be attained by older people. These same sources also describe “days of sorrow” often endured by unfortunate elders who lived too long. Writers from the fourth through nineteenth centuries added to the treasure-trove of positive, negative, ambiguous, ambivalent, and conflicting images of the bio-medico-psycho-social dimensions of the last stage of life. Many “facts” that scientists report in the current gerontology literature correspond to age-old descriptions of old age.

By the same token, gerontologists lately have disclosed other aspects of aging that are truly novel. According to demographers, at least two-thirds of the improvement in human longevity has occurred since 1900. During this century, gains in life expectancy at birth and in adulthood have altered relationships: for the first time in our history, most middle-aged Americans have more living grandparents than children; senior citizens outnumber teenagers. There is an increasing incidence of five-generation families.

Thanks to breakthroughs in biotechnology, we are on the verge of modifying processes of senescence at the cellular level. New medications, sophisticated prosthetic devices, and a better understanding of diet and nutrition have dramatically improved the quality of late life.

Reflecting onThe Way of the Investigator, Walter Bradford Cannon identified certain intellectual qualities and technical competencies that every medical researcher should possess. “The investigator in biological science should have, besides a knowledge of electrical apparatus and its uses, a good grounding in other aspects of physics and also chemistry.” In addition to this, complex statistical methods were “a valuable adjunct to the biologist's mental equipment” in order to measure phenomena as accurately as possible. Cannon felt that “serendipity” made multidisciplinary approaches efficatious in the biological and physical sciences. Solutions to “urgent, difficult and apparently baffling social problems are likely to be made by minds characterized by learning and liberality,” the Harvard physiologist, who was one of gerontology's architects, noted. “Quite unforeseen possibilities will unexpectedly spring forth.”

Cannon's own career as a researcher, teacher, and philosopher of science attests to the importance of intellectual curiosity, dedication and “unforeseen possibilities” in the life of an investigator. Family friends and neighbors in St. Paul, Minnesota, made it financially possible for Cannon to attend Harvard; he graduated summa cum laude in 1896. Upon receiving his M.D. four years later, he was appointed an instructor of physiology at Harvard Medical School; from 1906 until his retirement in 1942, he served as George Higginson Professor of Physiology. Cannon presented his first research papers while in medical school: Using primitive X-ray equipment, he was the first person to study the motor activity of the alimentary tract uncomplicated by anesthesia.