January 2008 Newsletter, Vol. 37, No.1
2007 HSS Prize Winners
Old Age, Rats, and Diets: Hyung Wook Park Wins the Reingold Prize
Hyung Wook Park’s initial questions about the absence of old animals and people in scientific research led him to the farmyards of 1930s and 1940s America and the origins of gerontology. Park, who received the 2007 Nathan Reingold Prize for “‘The Thin Rats Bury the Fat Rats’: Animal Husbandry, Caloric Restriction, and the Making of a Cross-Disciplinary Research Project,” studied biology for his undergraduate degree at Yonsei University in Seoul. He then made the switch to history of science for his Master’s degree, specializing, naturally, in the history of biology, specifically the work of Frank Macfarlane Burnet, who won a Nobel Prize in physiology in 1960.
“I wondered why he did not study old age. Later, I found scientists and physicians have an enormous interest in the young – pediatrics is a strong medical field in which a lot of money and personnel and resources are concentrated. I wondered why people are not interested in the later parts of life and I found that there is a social prejudice against old age, which reflects in the choice of scientific subjects. Younger people and younger organisms such as mice and rats are subjects in various research programs, but not older rats and mice and people. I think ageism is an important social phenomenon that needs to be studied. If race, gender, and class are important in history of science, why not age? That was my primary question.”
After moving to the Ph.D. Program at the University of Minnesota in 2003 as a student of Sally Gregory Kohlstedt and John Eyler, Park studied this problem more deeply. He found a large interdisciplinary scientific field focused on gerontology as well as a national institute of aging within the National Institutes of Heath. That led to further questions: “I wondered what the social and cultural factors were in this growth of gerontology.”
As he examined the character of gerontology as a field and found a key player in Clive McCay, who helped bring gerontology into the scientific fold in the 1930s and 1940s. “What’s really interesting is that he promoted research on caloric intake and longevity. I also realized that the discourse on caloric research is now everywhere -- how reducing caloric intake probably increases longevity. I thought it could be interesting to study the history of that research which begins with McCay.”
What began as an investigation into the research on human aging ended up in the farmyard. “Most historians think that the discourse of ageism focuses on human aging, but McCay was trying to increase the longevity of farm animals such as cows and chickens.” McCay’s interests as a professor of animal husbandry at Cornell University lay in animal aging. His experiments on caloric restrictions with rats produced skinny, young-looking rats. It is here, says Park, that interdisciplinarity became critical. Was the difference in outwards appearance real, or did the thin rat just look young? “It was important to find out if that rat was really young in terms of brain, metabolism, and the ability to communicate, and for that McCay needed other specialties than animal husbandry. Many other fields such as biochemistry, physiology, psychology, and pharmacology came to study caloric restrictions and longevity and the field gradually became larger and larger.”
By Michal Meyer