Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Development of Science of Aging

这个科学与社会论文改进补助金为学生提供资金前往档案馆收集数据，从而帮助他完成他在科学史领域的论文。本文对世纪上半叶老龄化研究的发展进行了历史性的梳理。本课程将探讨美国科学家如何在世纪早期为研究衰老提供新的理论和方法，以及大萧条和第二次世界大战的社会动荡如何促使他们将其研究制度化为一个多学科领域。该项目的第一部分涉及几位生物学家和生物医学科学家，他们为改变衰老知识做出了贡献，包括亚历克西斯·卡雷尔、阿尔弗雷德·科恩、雷蒙德·珀尔、H。S.詹宁斯和年轻的埃德蒙·文森特·考德里。与以前的历史学家认为在这一时期对衰老的科学理解没有根本变化不同，该项目将研究衰老的新实验方法如何带来衰老只是一种偶然和局部现象的想法。这一观点与传统观点大相径庭，传统观点认为，衰老是支配整个身体的某些重要原则衰退或减少的必然结果。论文的第二部分将分析大萧条和战争期间美国和英国不同的社会结构和对经济问题的反应如何制约两国老年学发展和制度化的不同形式。特别是弗拉基米尔Korenchevsky和Nuffield基金会在建立老年学在英国的作用将比较埃德蒙考德里，克莱夫M。麦凯和小乔赛亚·梅西基金会在美国。该项目将分析后者如何以及为什么在构建老龄化研究人员的更大多学科网络方面比前者更成功，尽管是英国科学家发起了这一运动并影响了美国人。最后，该项目调查了英国科学家彼得B。梅达沃在1946年提出了老龄化的进化理论，并在更广泛的文化和知识背景下接受了这一理论，特别是当代英国人越来越关注人口老龄化和新的进化理论的影响。这个项目有两个智力上的优点。首先，它将解释衰老的科学观念如何以及为什么在世纪早期经历了实质性的变化，尽管它自亚里士多德和盖伦时代以来没有发生重大变化。本论文探讨如何科学认识衰老开始通过新的实验方法，如组织培养和遗传分析在新的机构环境中，特别是那些海洋生物实验室在伍兹霍尔，洛克菲勒医学研究所，和几所大学的生物系。第二，该项目将提供一个比较分析，在大萧条和第二次世界大战期间，美国和英国不同的社会条件及其变化如何在这两个国家带来不同形式的老年学制度化。该项目对科学史和科学编史学的广泛影响是双重的。首先，它将进一步加深我们对关于年龄范畴的科学话语的性质的理解，这一范畴的研究比性别、种族和阶级的研究要少得多。其次，分析这一时期多学科侦查的性质及其在英美的成功程度。这将揭示如何以及为什么学者与不同的专业规范和假设，如细胞学家，生物化学家，精算师，心理学家和人类学家，决定从他们不同的角度研究衰老和制度化的合作科学方法。

This Science and Society Dissertation Improvement Grant provides funding for a student to travel to archives to collect data and thereby assist in his completing his dissertation in the field of the history of science. The dissertation offers a historical explanation of the development of the research on aging in the first half of the twentieth century. It will investigate how the American scientists provided a new theory and methodology for studying senescence during the early twentieth century, and how the social turmoil in the Great Depression and the Second World War prompted them to institutionalize their research as a multidisciplinary field. The first part of the project deals with several biologists and biomedical scientists who contributed to transforming knowledge on aging, including Alexis Carrel, Alfred Cohn, Raymond Pearl, H. S. Jennings, andyoung Edmund Vincent Cowdry. Unlike previous historians who have argued that there was no essential change in the scientific understanding of aging during this period, the project will study how new experimental approaches to senescence brought about the idea that aging was only a contingent and local phenomenon. This idea considerably differed from the traditional thought that aging was an inevitable consequence of the decay or decrease of some vital principle governing the whole body. The second part of the dissertation will analyze how different social structures and responses to the economic problems in America and Britain during the Depression and the War conditioned the distinct forms of gerontology's development and institutionalization in the two countries. Particularly, the role of Vladimir Korenchevsky and the Nuffield Foundation in building gerontology in Britain will be compared with that of Edmund Cowdry, Clive M. McCay, and the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation in the United States. The project will analyze how and why the latter was more successful in constructing larger multidisciplinary networks of the researchers of aging than the former, although it was the British scientists who initiated this movement and influenced the Americans. Finally, the project investigates the British scientist Peter B. Medawar's conception of the evolutionary theory of aging in 1946 and its reception in broader cultural and intellectual contexts, especially through contemporary Britons' increasing concerns about the aging of their population and the influence of new evolutionary theories. This project has two intellectual merits. First, it will explain how and why scientific ideas of aging underwent a substantial change during the early twentieth century, although it had not been greatly altered since the time of Aristotle and Galen. The dissertation investigates how scientific understanding of senescence began to be transformed through novel experimental approaches like tissue culture and genetic analysis within new institutional environments, especially those of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research, and several university biology departments. Second, the project will offer a comparative analysis on how distinct social conditions and their changes in America and Britain during the Great Depression and the Second World War brought about different forms of institutionalization of gerontology in these two countries. The broader impacts of the project upon the history and historiography of science are twofold. First, it will further our understanding of the nature of scientific discourse on the category of age, which has been much less studied than that of gender, race, and class. Second, it will analyze the nature of multidisciplinary investigation and the extent of its success in America and Britain during this period. This will reveal how and why scholars with distinct professional norms and assumptions, such as cytologists, biochemists, actuaries, psychologists, and anthropologists, decided to study aging from their diverse perspectives and to institutionalize their cooperative scientific approach.