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1 - Surveying the frontiers of 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

“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.”

Type
Chapter
Information
Crossing Frontiers
Gerontology Emerges as a Science
, pp. 23 - 51
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1995

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