The Sciences of Ageing and the Culture of Youth, 1880 to the present day

Cultural pessimism about ageing endangers intergenerational solidarity; it shapes perceptions of the worth and value of human beings and directs decisions about care, research and funding priorities. SAACY will inform practices and policy development in these areas. Age UK, a leading UK charity for older people, holds ageing to involve teeth, bones, the cardiovascular, respiratory, immune and endocrine systems. Dementia, perhaps surprisingly, features as only one of six systems affected. Yet, with its profound connotations of cognitive loss, dementia has become virtually synonymous with ageing in the popular imagination. This emphasis on cognition impacts upon negative valuations of ageing; and healthcare focus on cognition detracts from other important problems of older age. SAACY seeks to understand the significance of this emphasis on cognition, and to find out where it comes from. Is it led by scientific research; can it be explained by skewed popular scientific accounts or by healthcare practice; or is it culturally driven? This project takes a historical approach, while benefitting from the PI's unique perspective of someone who has achieved academic distinction in neuropharmacology and been active and successful in the health humanities for over a decade. It will chart the dynamic exchange between scientific and medical ideas of senescence, their popular scientific conduit and cultural images of ageing from 1880-today. A century-old body of cellular research explains ageing as a lifelong physiological process. This perspective has lasting import in evolutionary theories of ageing. These can explain physiologically aberrations of the cell cycle (which can lead to cancer), hormonal changes in mid-life (like the menopause) and degenerative conditions typical of older age (like arthritis or cardiovascular disease). They also explain brain ageing as a continuous variation in cognitive able-ness in a biologically changing body, and emphasise that, like cells of other organs, brain cells age. But this explanation carries little weight in a society in which dementia epitomises the ultimate condition of loss, of personhood in older age. Media hype about curing Alzheimer's and extending life are eagerly absorbed by a culture hailing youth; it also justifies priority of cure-focused research and amplifies aversion to old age. The experiential consequences of memory loss are devastating, and there are genetic forms of dementia for which a cure might become available. Yet, appreciating the physiological similarities between e.g. age-related loss of mobility and loss of memory would help lift stigma of failure from dementia. SAACY argues that societal fears about dementia are partly explained by the research trajectory that memory loss in older subjects has taken. Almost from the moment brain cells came under scrutiny, cognitive ageing was considered an organic disease of the brain; the focus became brain cell disorganisation as pathological, and brain involution as something needing to be cured gained scientific, medical and cultural ascendancy. SAACY investigates the pathways and rationales that have led culture selectively to assign truth value to some scientific concepts and not others. It explores the origins of and reasons for the cultural emphasis on ageing as pathological decline rather than continuous physiological change. It will insist that notions of development have an explicit place within the scientific research agenda. It ensures that concepts like life-experience will move from the margins of literary scholarship to become constitutive of the cultural transcript of ageing. In its Ageing Society Grand Challenge, the UK Government sets out an agenda for how to 'build a Britain fit for the future'. SAACY provides a firm basis on which to meet the Government's Healthy Ageing Challenge, a basis that values care as well as cure, and stresses that healthy ageing comes from embracing continuous change, at every age.