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Ask George Vaillant '51 about the title of his book Aging Well, published earlier this year by Little, Brown, and you're liable to get a small explosion. "That's what happens when innocent academics are offered real advances and contracts," he erupts. "I protested the title, but that's what they thought would work, and it backfired. The hope was Oprah would take it up and I'd be talking to you from the south of France. Instead, people have shoved it in the diet and health section, where people who wanted a diet and health book would be very disappointed if they bought it.". Indeed, Vaillant's book-which is subtitled "Surprising guideposts to a happier life from the landmark Harvard Study of Adult Development"-is a far cry from the eat-your-carrots-and-don't-smoke lecture one might expect from the cover. Instead, it's more like a later-life installment in the What to Expect series of books on pregnancy and early childhood, one that covers psychological development from age 20 to age 80, and offers conclusions about how one can lead a successful, healthy and satisfying life even into one's ninth decade. The book is based on Vaillant's research as director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which studies how healthy people develop and grow over the course of their entire lives, and is, he contends, the longest study of aging in the world. The project began in 1938 as a single study-then known as the Grant Study-of 268 healthy Harvard graduates born around 1920, later adding, for comparison's sake, a second cohort of 456 inner-city men born between 1925 and 1932, and a third sample of 90 intellectually gifted women from California born between 1908 and 1914. What he learned from his 35 years in the study does not boil down easily into a single paragraph-hence Vaillant's engrossing and well-written book, which explores many different discoveries and employs characters drawn from a wide swath of study participants to illustrate these principles. Three are obvious ingredients of a long and healthy life, and these would be-all together, now-don't drink, don't smoke, don't put on too much weight. But to put it in a nutshell, Vaillant says, the most important thing he found was that how well people age is up to them. "I didn't expect the degree of control that people actually have over aging," he says. "Growing old is much less of a crapshoot than you would think. When you see the terrible things that happen to good people, and the good things that happen to terrible people, it's hard to think we have any control over what happens to us from a statistical point of view. But we do." And it all boils down to attitude. A person who is able to handle conflict in a mature way-to effectively deal with the blows life deals and make lemonade out of lemons, to repeat an oft-used metaphor in Vaillant's book-often ends well. And people who are able to enjoy other people in their lives, who allow themselves to be enriched by their relationships with others, are also more likely to age well. "Those are the two most central issues in living," he says, "much more important than social class or education or money." Lessons Learned Over Time After graduating from Exeter in 1951 and attending Harvard for his undergraduate as well as medical degrees, Vaillant became interested in following up on a population of schizophrenics and abstinent heroin addicts from 10 to 50 years after they had sought treatment. "I've found that long-term followup produces catharsis and is a powerful tool that influences human behavior," he says. After that experience, in 1967 he joined the Grant Study and quickly found it to be his calling. "The study had a caterpillar-to-butterfly quality of adolescents turning into parents of adolescents. I became instantly fascinated by what I found, and stayed with it." Aging Well is, in fact, Vaillant's fourth book from the study; the others include Adaptation to Life and A Natural History of Alcoholism. As part of the Grant Study, Vaillant reviewed written questionnaires sent to the participants every two years, and conducted many face-to-face interviews with the Harvard grads over the years. Then in 1975, the second group, inner-city men who had been followed from 1939 to 1962 in a separate study, was added to round out the sample. The third group, women culled from what is called the Terman Study, came on board late in the game, in 1987. "The study loses in that women aren't there," Vaillant admits, and then adds in explanation: "In biology you have to hold your sample constant. The more different your subjects are from each other, the harder it is to draw conclusions about why they differ. But the homogeneity of the sample is frustrating to a majority of the world's population." |
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