Senior Scientists' Experience Can Offer A Valuable Resource To Today's Students

A large and growing group of individuals -- the seniors -- is being chased out of our factories, our offices, our classrooms, our boardrooms, and in fact out of all aspects of active professional life. Although America is aging, and the mean age creeps up inexorably, institution after institution has programs designed to get rid of any gray heads with many years of experience and faithful service and replace them with younger, cheaper, and often part-time employees. AT&T, IBM, and other big-business names are downsizing. One of their powerful pruning tools is to coax old-timers into retirement with seemingly attractive retirement packages. Many of these strategies have succeeded, leaving factories and offices devoid of workers over 55 years old. The urge to de-age the work force has reached the universities. Using the same tactics as industry, academe is offering early-retirement schemes that lure senior faculty into nonproductive lives. As a result, students are exposed to role models of young, relatively inexperienced, and often part-time instructors. In medical schools, the lack of senior professors with first-hand experience with aging leaves a void in the education of physicians, who will have to cope with an aging population of patients. The well-documented decline with age of the applicant for funding by National Institutes of Health and other granting agencies has transformed science into an activity of the young and middle-aged. In reviewing grant applications and papers submitted to journals, I have seen several instances of work proposed or completed that repeats observations made by investigators before the computer age, which are too historical to be in computer databases. Another consequence is the elimination of risk-taking, innovative research that only senior scientists can undertake because they have reached the top of the promotion scale. Do seniors continue to be productive? The Republican standard-bearer in the November election is the septuagenarian Bob Dole. Symphony orchestras thrived under the aged batons of Leopold Stowkowski, Charles Munch, and Georg Solti. During many postwar years, West Germany was led by Konrad Adenauer, who was affectionately called "Der Alte," or "the old man." In the world of science there are many examples of senior contributors. Linus Pauling, for example, sparked controversy for decades after the "normal" retirement age. Among those I knew personally, J.H. Quastel was at the height of his work in the biochemistry of cancer as director of the Montreal General Hospital Research Institute at McGill University when he was forced to step down at age 65. Fortunately, he was provided with a research unit at the University of British Columbia, where he continued to be productive doing fundamental research in neurochemistry until his death 20 years later. At my advanced age I continue to teach and do what research I can. I am involved with a couple of minority student programs that deal with small groups. These programs are out of the mainstream of the curriculum and are invisible to teaching awards. Younger faculty hesitate to undertake activities that escape the recognition so necessary to career advancement. I am rewarded by the inner satisfaction of the role I play in the professional development of students who enter medical school with educational and societal deficits. In research I can undertake problems that are shunned by younger investigators, who must pursue less risky, short-term projects during their climb up the academic ladder. My long experience in research helps me to be economical in the use of laboratory and financial resources. With the support of a few small grants, I have worked for more than a decade on the oral administration of insulin. The project has succeeded in almost normalizing hyperglycemia in diabetic dogs. We also found unexpected and very exciting evidence for production of insulin by the gut and for the role of insulin in the control of gut mortality and absorption (F. Williams, M. Saffran, Drug Delivery, 3:81-5, 1996). In any definition of diversity, seniors must be included, in addition to the other colorations and variations of the human race. The rich store of experience that can come only with a long life must be tapped as a resource for the education of students. And students must also be aware of the limitations of movement and adaptability imposed by aging, and be sensitive to the needs of seniors for rest and tranquility. We oldsters deserve as much consideration as any other labeled population. Murray Saffran is assistant dean in the Office of Medical Education and professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the Medical College of Ohio, Toledo. He is 72 years old. E-mail: msaffran@vortex.mco.edu.

Senior Scientists' Experience Can Offer A Valuable Resource To Today's Students

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