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6 - The federal government as sponsor, producer, and consumer of research on aging

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2010

W. Andrew Achenbaum
Affiliation:
Institute of Gerontology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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Summary

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.

Type
Chapter
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Crossing Frontiers
Gerontology Emerges as a Science
, pp. 187 - 218
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1995

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