Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Old age becomes a “problem” worth investigating scientifically
- Part II Gerontology takes shape in the era of Big Science
- 4 Organizing the Gerontological Society to promote interdisciplinary research amid disciplinary and professional constrictions
- 5 Risk taking in the modern research university and the fate of multidisciplinary institutes on aging
- 6 The federal government as sponsor, producer, and consumer of research on aging
- 7 Gerontology in the service of America's aging veterans
- Conclusion
- Index
4 - Organizing the Gerontological Society to promote interdisciplinary research amid disciplinary and professional constrictions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Old age becomes a “problem” worth investigating scientifically
- Part II Gerontology takes shape in the era of Big Science
- 4 Organizing the Gerontological Society to promote interdisciplinary research amid disciplinary and professional constrictions
- 5 Risk taking in the modern research university and the fate of multidisciplinary institutes on aging
- 6 The federal government as sponsor, producer, and consumer of research on aging
- 7 Gerontology in the service of America's aging veterans
- Conclusion
- Index
Summary
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:
The purposes for which the corporation is to be formed are to promote the scientific study of aging, in order to advance public health and mental hygiene, the science and art of medicine, and the cure of disease: to foster the growth and diffusion of knowledge relating to problems of aging and of the sciences contributing to an understanding thereof; to afford a common meeting ground for representation of the various scientific fields interested in such problems and those responsible for care and treatment of the aged.
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.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Crossing FrontiersGerontology Emerges as a Science, pp. 125 - 156Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995