Interaction

February 15, 2006

New center on longevity

Photo: L.A. Cicero

Psychologist Laura Carstenson, left; teaching assistant Cara Rice, center; and neurologist Thomas Rando
are co-teaching a course this quarter called Longevity.

To be independent or to seek a home with others? The road to becoming an independent lab is neither short nor easy. Some researchers might think the costs outweigh the benefits. For others, such as Laura Carstensen, a lifespan developmental psychologist, independence is essential for the integrity and success of the research project.

The future Stanford Center on Longevity, directed by Carstensen, is likely to become the university's next independent lab. The center's ultimate aim is to improve the well-being of aging individuals, which means everybody. Carstensen takes great pains to point out that longevity is not a synonym for old age.

She began the march to independence in 2004, when she met with President John Hennessy, Provost John Etchemendy and Dean of Research Arthur Bienenstock (the latter two both former directors of independent labs), as well as with potential donors, to propose a bold, multidisciplinary, freestanding research center.

According to the report issued by the Provost's Exploratory Committee on Longevity, which came into existence as a result of Carstensen's proposal, Stanford is home to a multitude of researchers in an array of fields relevant to longevity who nonetheless have no way of working with each other or even of knowing about each other's work. The report furthermore states that basic research is often difficult to translate into policy or to implement in such a way as to make a difference in people's lives.

"This will be more interdisciplinary than anything else on campus," Carstensen said confidently in the fall. "The nature of the subject naturally embraces all seven schools. There were deans who would have liked to house it [in their schools], because it will bring in money, but that would defeat the point."

Declining the deans' offers of hospitality, Carstensen instead chose to work with Bienenstock, whose job, she said, "is to ensure the good of the university as a whole."

Carstensen envisions a place, a physical place, where people will be able to meet. If the funding goes well, which she expects it will, the center should be up and running in five years. The building would be a permanent home for staff and a temporary home for researchers, professionals and policymakers from Stanford and elsewhere. The center would fund translational research by, for example, patent attorneys and entrepreneurs, and would have what Carstensen called a department of cultural change, where academics, journalists and survey-takers could study and share information about the aging process. Projects would be clustered among five research sections: brain and mind; social innovations; sensation and locomotion; healthy living and disease prevention; and disparities, focusing on social and genetic risks faced by specific individuals or groups.

"The goal is to change the nature of human aging," Carstensen said. "We're not going to cure disease. We want to change the way people live at all ages."

Within that perspective, Carstensen and others believe that our lives are organized around a chronology that makes little sense.

"The extra years don't have to come at the end," she pointed out. Why not pay Social Security benefits to people raising children, for example, when they need to be at home? Many old people are perfectly capable of working and might not need the income then, particularly if they've earned well throughout their lives.

Changing our notion of age, she said, "involves talking to children, changing the way universities operate, setting up businesses, intervening in national policy. We can turn an average of 30 extra years into an extraordinary advance in human life."

To that end, engineers and physicians and social scientists and entrepreneurs need to put their heads together. "This coming together is possible because we all face a common problem," Carstensen said, "and we all need each other in order to fix things."

Carstensen is no stranger to interdisciplinary research and collaboration. From 1997 to 2001 she was director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, where for two years she led a project on aging under the rubric of IRWG's "Difficult Dialogues" program. Participants from Stanford and elsewhere concluded that there is a clear correspondence between gender and race, on the one hand, and difficulties in aging, on the other. How one ages has a lot to do with who one is. Most obviously, the world of the very old is a female world. And it's an increasingly populous world.

When Carstensen said that changing our notion of age involves talking to children, she specifically mentioned the Stanford Center on Adolescence, run by education Professor William Damon, one of the members of the Provost's Exploratory Committee on Longevity (http://www.stanford.edu/group/adolescent.ctr/).

The Center on Adolescence was founded in 1996 with a $1.2 million, two-year grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York to promote multidisciplinary research and training.

The two centers, which have plans to work together and might even eventually live together, are models of the different routes leading to multidisciplinary research. When Damon, an expert on moral development, was hired in 1997 from Brown University after a wide-ranging, nationwide search, he was given a choice: Make it freestanding or find a home for it. Choosing the latter, he turned to the School of Education. (Had the incoming director been from another field, he or she and the center could have been housed in the director's respective school or department.)

"I went to Education for practical reasons," he said, "because I didn't want to have to fundraise for staff and infrastructure." School of Education Dean Deborah Stipek gives him all that, leaving him free to raise funds solely for research.

"But I'll be frank; there are downsides," he added, and they sound a lot like the downsides Carstensen wanted to avoid, namely being overly associated with one field over another.

"Once you're in an existing department or school, [the university expects] everything to come from them. It's a snowball effect, so we're more and more slanted toward education," Damon said.

It is also difficult to attract the interest of researchers outside the field of education, he said. And, because physical space is allotted by departments and schools, which by definition are rooted in disciplines, his new home (he is currently in Cypress Hall) will be at the Center for Educational Research at Stanford, a fine building, but one obviously connected to the School of Education.

It would be ideal, Damon said, if the university had "a separate pot for multidisciplinary space."

"I'm not complaining," he hastened to add. "Stanford is a great place, and this center will exist in perpetuity. But there are tradeoffs."

His particular research is called "youth purpose," an approach that emphasizes the aspirations and potential of young people rather than the pitfalls and dangers they encounter. When he arrived at Stanford, he said, the hallway of the pre-existing center was lined with depressing posters announcing the numbers of teen suicides, teen pregnancies and teen drug overdoses. They're gone.

Young people have a different attitude toward aging than older people, Carstensen said, noting that Damon's work therefore will be invaluable to her project. Damon called their shared interest "successful aging."

"Younger people see time as infinite; we recognize limits," she said. "Older people gather less information and are more focused on emotionally meaningful things. But when younger people's relationship to time changes, and suddenly it's not infinite because they're considering a subset of time, then they behave differently."

At that point, she said, "Students get it. They can see that age is a matter of time, and they can relate."

Carstensen envisions the Center on Longevity having links to multidisciplinary centers and institutes beyond the Center on Adolescence. For example, new devices will enable aging people to maintain their participation in active daily life, so the Institute of Design could have a role; public-opinion surveys can point to widely held biases and needs, so the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences could have a role; people age differently in different parts of the world, so the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies could have a role.

Brain function certainly is a crucial piece of aging, and it is with, precisely, a neurologist that Carstensen is preparing the way for the future independent lab this quarter by team-teaching an undergraduate class called Longevity (Psychology 102). Her partner in this venture is Dr. Thomas Rando, a winner last year of the prestigious National Institutes of Health Director's Pioneer Award for his work on stem cells and degenerative disease.

Just three weeks into the quarter, the two instructors agreed that the class is going well and that students appear to be engaged.

"It's also notable that every single faculty member we've invited to attend as a guest has enthusiastically accepted the invitation," Carstensen said. Those guests represent six of the university's seven schools. "It's exciting to be able to change the way younger people are thinking about aging individuals and aging societies. I think the course will become an integral part of the [center's] ?eculture change' mission."

Next year, Carstensen will start building a national and international research network and soliciting proposals for projects and visitors to the center. By 2007-08, according to the provost's report, a physical space should be ready to house at least temporary flexible research space. The long-term plan calls for a space similarly innovative and flexible as the Clark Center, home to Bio-X.

"Ultimately," the report says, "a space that houses the entire operation is important. It is clear that the power of proximity cannot be overstated."