But even the most carefully designed prospective study in the world can never free us completely from time’s confounding influence. Lifetime studies have to last many, many years, and over those years everything will be changing—our questions, our techniques, our subjects, ourselves. I’ve been studying adult development since I was thirty, and I know now that many of my past conjectures, apparently accurate at the time, were contingent or just plain wrong. Still, the Grant Study is one of the first vantage points the world has ever had on which to stand and look prospectively at a man’s life from eighteen to ninety. Having it doesn’t save us from surprises, frustrations, and conundrums; quite the contrary. Nevertheless, a continuous view of a lifetime is now possible for human beings. Like that time-lapse film of a flower blooming that Disney made famous in the sixties, it is an awesome gift.
When the Study was undertaken in 1938, what we knew about human development across the whole of life was mostly based on inspiration or intuition. William Shakespeare delineated seven ages of man in As You Like It in 1599; Erik Erikson defined eight stages in Childhood and Society three hundred and fifty years later.10 But Shakespeare and Erikson didn’t have much by way of real data to go on. Neither did Sheehy and Levinson. Neither did I, in Adaptation to Life. Nobody had access to prospectively studied whole lifetimes. I hope that this book, written in 2012, will begin to correct that lack.
THE ART OF THE POSSIBLE
A few caveats as we proceed. It is well known that the Grant Study includes only white Harvard men; Arlen V. Bock, the physician who founded it, has frequently been criticized for arrogance and chauvinism on that account. It’s less well known that the Grant Study was not an attempt to document average health over time, like the more famous Framingham Study, but to define the best health possible. And we must therefore keep in mind two realities. First, lifetime studies, like politics, are the art of the possible. As Samuel Johnson famously quipped about dogs walking on their hind legs, “It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.” Second, in such huge undertakings, one must optimize one’s chance of success. Columbia neuroscientist Eric Kandel did not choose a random sample of the world’s population of homo sapiens when he did his Nobel-winning work on the biology of memory; he chose the obscure sea snail called Aplysia. Why? Because Aplysia has unusually large neurons. And it was precisely the gender and privilege of the Grant Study men that made them so useful for a study of human adaptation and development. Men don’t change their names in midlife and disappear to follow-up as women do. Well-to-do men don’t die early of malnutrition, infection, accident, or bad medical care, as happens much too often to poor ones. These men had a high likelihood of long life, a necessity for this sort of study. (A full 30 percent of the Grant Study men have made it to ninety, as opposed to the 3 to 5 percent expected of all white male Americans born around 1920.) Glass ceilings and racial prejudice were unlikely to hold them back from achieving to their fullest potential, or from the careers and lives that they desired. A Harvard diploma wouldn’t hurt either. When things went wrong in the lives of the Grant Study men, they would have a good chance of being able to set them right. Last but not least, they were unusually articulate historians. Bock needed all those advantages. You can’t study the development of delphiniums in Labrador or the Sahara. The Grant Study’s College cohort and Aplysia may not be perfectly representative, but they both afford us windows onto landscapes we have never been able to see before.
One further note on Bock’s choice of a homogeneous population. If we want to learn what people eat, we have to study many different populations. If we want to learn about gastrointestinal physiology, however, we try to keep variables like cultural habits and preferences uniform. Societies are forever changing, but biology mostly stays the same. This was another reason for the Grant Study’s strategy. It was examining healthy digestion, not traditional menus. When possible, however, the Grant Study has checked its findings against other homogeneous studies of different populations, especially the disadvantaged men of the Inner City cohort and the highly educated women of the Terman cohort.
STUDYING THE STUDY
It is reasonable to ask whether this book is necessary. Over its seventy-five years of existence, the Study of Adult Development has so far produced 9 books and 150 articles, including quite a number of my own (see Appendix F). Why another? Well, because it’s not always easy to see how reports of any given instant relate to the future, or even to the past. How do we understand a seventy-five-year-old article from a news daily? The short answer is, it depends on what’s happened since. Whatever the world’s papers were printing in the summer of 1940, England did not in fact fall to the Luftwaffe. Reporters do the best they can with what’s available, but momentary glimpses can never capture the totality of history, and things may well look different later on. This in a nutshell is why longitudinal studies are so important. And to reap their full value, we have to take a longitudinal view of the studies themselves. When I sit down to summarize my forty-five years of involvement with the Grant Study, much of what I’ve written in the past seems to me as ephemeral as the 1948 headlines that trumpeted Dewey’s victory over Truman, for only now do I understand how the story has really turned out. So far. As the people’s philosopher Yogi Berra observed long ago, “It ain’t over till it’s over.”
So as I see it, there are five reasons for this book. First, the Harvard Study of Adult Development is a unique, unprecedented, and extremely important study of human development. For that reason alone, its history deserves documentation.
Second, the Grant Study has been directed by four generations of scientists whose very different approaches beg for integration. The first director focused on physiology, the second on social psychology, the third (myself) on epidemiology and adaptation. The priorities of today’s director, the fourth, are relationships and brain imaging. As any methodologist can see, the Grant Study had no overarching design. In 1938, there weren’t enough prospective data on adult development even to build solid hypotheses. Like the Lewis and Clark Expedition and Darwin’s passage on the Beagle, the Grant Study was not a clearly focused experiment but a voyage of discovery (or, as some have less charitably suggested, a fishing trip). The findings I report in this book are largely serendipitous.
This is the first time in forty-five years I have allowed this awareness into consciousness, let alone confessed it in print. In my repeated requests to the National Institutes of Health for funding, I always emphasized the potential of the Study—the power of its telescopic lens, its low attrition rate—rather than any specific hypotheses I planned to test. I analyzed data whenever I had a good idea; like a magpie I’d scope out our huge piles of accumulated material looking for a telltale glint or glimmer. I have often wondered whether there is a Ph.D. program in the country that would have accepted the plans of any of the four Grant Study directors as a thesis proposal. But what a wonderful harvest serendipity has produced. As I will demonstrate with pleasure, unpredictability is an inevitable and sometimes infuriating aspect of large prospective studies, but it gives them a startling richness that more narrowly focused endeavors can never achieve. All the better for magpies. Perhaps it was a good thing that I never took a course in psychology or sociology. At least I had no preconceived ideas ruining my eye for an emperor’s new clothes.
Third, this book collects in one place material scattered across seventy years of specialty journals, in which the publications of each decade modified the findings of the previous ones, and were modified again in turn as new contexts cast new light on old data. Until now, for example, there’s been no recognition of the importance of alcoholism in studies of development. But it’s clear that earlier findings in some very unexpected areas are going to have to give way in the face of the Harvard Study of Adult Development’s accumulating evidence about the developmental effects of alcohol abuse. It proved to be the most important predictor of a shortened lifespan, for one thing, and it was a huge factor in the Gran
t Study divorces, for another. Science is a changing river too.
Fourth, the Grant Study has seen and absorbed many theoretical and technological transitions, especially in the evolving field of psychobiology. It began in a day when blood was still typed as I, II, III, and IV. Race, body build, and (more speculatively) the Rorschach were considered potentially predictive of adult developmental outcomes. Data were tabulated by hand in huge ledgers—even punch cards sorted with ice picks were a yet-undreamed-of technology. For calculation, the slide rule ruled. Today we grapple with DNA analysis, fMRIs, and attachment theory, and 2,000 variables can be stored on my laptop and analyzed instantly as I fly between Cambridge and Los Angeles. Here, too, documentation and integration are called for.
A fundamental paradox is my fifth and final reason for writing this book. Despite all the changes I aim to document, we are all still the same people—the men who joined the Study seventy-plus years ago, and I, who came to direct it in 1966. One of the great lessons to emerge in the last thirty years of research on adult development is that the French adage is right: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. People change, but they also stay the same. And the other way around.
A NOTE ON THE LIFE STORIES
I will be making my points in this book not only with numbers, but also with stories. The biographies of all living protagonists have been read and approved by them. All names are pseudonyms, but these narratives are not composites. They accurately depict the lives of real individuals, with the one stipulation that I have carefully altered some identifying details according to strict rules. I may substitute one research university for another, for example, but I do not substitute a research university for a small college, or vice versa—Williams College for Swarthmore, perhaps, but not for Yale. I allow Boston as an acceptable interchange for San Francisco, and Flint for Buffalo, but neither for Dubuque or Scarsdale. I have made similar narrow replacements among types of illnesses and specific careers. In this way I have striven to remain faithful to the spirit of these lives and maintain their distinctive flavor, while altering the letter to ensure privacy. From time to time a prominent member of the Study has made a public comment relating to his participation in it. When I have quoted such comments, I have not disguised their authorship.
THE LIFE OF ADAM NEWMAN
Let me begin my history of the Grant Study with a story that illustrates many of the themes that have intrigued, enlightened, and confounded me over our years together. The protagonist is Adam Newman (a pseudonym), whose life—seemingly different with every telling—confronted us constantly with the realities of time, identity, memory, and change that are the heart of this book.
Newman grew up in a lower-middle-class family. His father was a bank worker who never finished high school. One grandfather had been a physician, the other a saloon owner. There was relatively little mental illness in Newman’s family tree. Nevertheless, his childhood was grim. His mother told the Study that her first way of dealing with Adam’s tantrums was to tie him to the bed with his father’s suspenders. When that didn’t work, she took to throwing a pail of cold water in his face. Later she spanked him, sometimes with a switch. Adam became extremely controlled in his behavior. He maintained a strict belief in and observance of Catholic teachings, and concentrated on getting all A’s in school. His father was more lenient than his mother, but also more distant. “He only recognized that I was one of his children about once a month,” Adam said. There was little show of affection in the family, and in Newman’s 600-page record there is not a single happy childhood memory recounted. Rereading that record for this book, I see too that Newman says almost nothing about his father’s death when he was seventeen.
In high school, Adam was a leader. He was a class officer in all four years, and also an Eagle Scout. He had many acquaintances, but no close friends. When he was a sophomore at Harvard, a few of his intake interviewers for the Study described him as “attractive,” with “a delightful sense of humor.” Others, however, described him as aloof, rigid, inflexible, repelling, self-centered, repressed, and selfish—the first of a lifetime of clues that this was a man of contradictions.
Newman’s physical self was scrutinized minutely when he entered the Study, because the scientific vogue of the time was that constitutional and racial endowment could predict just about everything important in later life. He was described as a mesomorph of Nordic race with a masculine body build (all presumably excellent predictors for later success), but in poor physical condition. He was among the top 10 percent of the Grant Study men in general intelligence, and his grades were superior. As in high school, he had many acquaintances but few friends; he joined only the ornithology club and, eventually, that least social of fraternities, Phi Beta Kappa. One psychologist observed that he was “indifferent to fascism,” and Clark Heath, the Study internist and director, noted that he “did not like to be too close to people.”
In short, Adam lived mostly inside his own head. His personality was described as Well Integrated, but he was also considered a man of Sensitive Affect, Ideational, and Introspective; you’ll hear more about all these traits as we go along. He gained distinction in the psychological testing on two counts: for his intellectual gifts, and for being “the most uncooperative student who ever agreed to cooperate in our experiments.” In psychological “soundness” he ended up classified a “C,” the worst category. (For much more on the assessment process, see Chapter 3.)
The Study psychiatrists, informed by another theoretical fashion of the period, were more interested in Newman’s masturbatory history than in his social life at college. They took pains to classify him as cerebrotonic, as opposed to viscerotonic or somatotonic. (These terms imply constitutional distinctions between people who live by the intellect, by the senses, and by physical vigor, but they were never satisfactorily defined.) It’s also worth noting here, and it will come up again, that the early Study designers never put to the test their deep belief that body build is destiny. That had to wait for many years, even though opportunities for an empirical trial soon became available.
As a nineteen-year-old sophomore, Newman took a hard line on sex. He condemned masturbation, and he boasted to the Study psychiatrist that he would drop any friend who engaged in premarital intercourse. The psychiatrist noted in his turn, however, that although Adam disapproved of sexual activity, he was “frankly very much interested in it as a topic of thought.” Newman told the psychiatrist a dream, too: two trees grew together, their trunks meeting at the top to form a chest with two drawers side by side, suggestive of a naked woman. He would wake from this dream, which visited him repeatedly, filled with anxiety.
To my mind, there was no adolescent in the Study who better exemplified psychoanalytic ideas about repressed sexuality than Adam Newman. And it was typical of the Grant Study’s approach at the time that while Freud’s theories were carefully explained to Newman (who vigorously rejected them), no one asked him about dating or friendships.
He was as dogmatic politically as he was sexually, and he regularly tore up the “propaganda” he received from the “sneaky” college Liberal Union. He claimed a commitment to empirical science both as an idea and as a career, but he also remained a practicing Catholic, attending Mass four times a week. When an interviewer wondered how his religious and scientific views fit together, he replied, “Religion is my private refuge. To attack it with my intellect would be to spoil it.” More contradiction.
It wasn’t until ten years later, when the scientific climate had shifted away from physical anthropology toward social psychology, and relationships had become a matter of interest, that the Study recorded that Newman had had few close friends in college besides his roommate, and that he had dated only rarely. In part this may have been because Adam was working to pay all of his college expenses himself, and was also sending money home to his fatherless family. But it’s also true that he met early a Wellesley College math major who would become his wife and “best friend forever.�
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Adam went to medical school at Penn. He didn’t want to minister to the sick, but he did want to study biostatistics and avoid the draft. He married during his second year there, but except for his wife he remained rather isolated. He had no more interest in World War II than he had in patient care. On graduation he fulfilled his military obligations with classified research at Edgewood Arsenal, America’s research locus for biological warfare, and he continued in that work after the war. By 1950, Dr. Heath, the Study director, noted that Captain Newman, shaping the Cold War’s nuclear deterrents but never seeing patients, was making more money than any of the other forty-five physicians in the Study. One of Newman’s unclassified papers was “Burst Heights and Blast Damage from Atomic Bombs.”
Despite these oddities, the record shows that by 1952, when he was thirty-two, Newman was steadily maturing. He was settling into a lifetime career in the biostatistics that he loved, using his leadership talents to build a smoothly running department of fifty people at NASA. His ethical concerns were engaged professionally too; in the 1960s his group participated in President Johnson’s plan to put the military-industrial complex to work on the economic problems of the third world. His marriage would remain devoted for fifty years, by his wife’s testimony as well as his own. It was an eccentric marriage—the two of them acknowledged each other as best friend, but neither had any other intimate friends at all. But many Study men with bleak childhoods sought marriages that could assuage old lonelinesses without imposing intolerable relational burdens, and Adam Newman seems to have found one. Perhaps this is why, unlike many men with childhoods like his, he effortlessly mastered the adult tasks of Intimacy, Career Consolidation, and Generativity (see Chapter 5) so early in his life.
Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study Page 2