- Email: [email protected]
Robert Neil Butler
Obituary
AP
The printed journal includes an image merely for illustration
Robert Neil Butler Gerontologist and founding director of the US National Institute on Aging. He was born on Jan 21, 1927, in New York, NY, USA and died of leukaemia on July 4, 2010, aged 83 years. In November last year, Robert Butler travelled to Dubai to co-chair a meeting for the World Economic Forum’s Council on the Ageing Society. When the official proceedings had wrapped up, his co-chair, Jay Olshansky from the University of Illinois at Chicago, said to the 82-year-old “let’s go and do something neither of us has done before”, Olshansky recalls. Soon enough, the two men were sitting in an ice bar, a venue where all the furniture is made of ice and the air is chilled to below freezing. While the mid-day desert temperatures outside soared, they donned heavy winter coats and chuckled over heated bowls of chicken soup. “He said to me, ‘I love adventures’”, says Olshansky. For more than 50 years, Butler was a champion of the rights of older people to experience the kind of rich and fulfilled life he enjoyed himself. He coined the phrase “ageism” to describe endemic discrimination against the elderly, which led people, he famously wrote, to lead lives of “quiet despair, deprivation, desolation and muted rage”. “Bob Butler was a pioneer who sought to redefine aging, for both individuals and society”, said Director of the National Institute on Aging (NIA) Richard J Hodes. “He challenged the status quo, looking at what can be achieved in later life, not at what might be lost. The field of ageing 588
research—and anyone seeking a better life with age—has lost a best friend.” Butler’s parents separated when he was 11 months old, and he was raised by his grandparents. In an interview in 2001, he said that his interest in ageism had its roots in his medical school days, when he was disturbed to hear professors refer to older people—people like his grandparents—as “crocks”. “In medical school, every effort was made to introduce us to middle-aged and younger patients, but older patients were considered to be beyond help—in other words, not teaching material”, he added. In the 1950s and 1960s, while working at the National Institute of Mental Health, Butler was involved in one of the first comprehensive, long-term studies of communitydwelling older people, which showed, among other things, that senility is not an inevitable consequence of age. In 1976, after some years of teaching and private practice, he became the founding director of the NIA of the US National Institutes of Health. By that time he had already achieved prominence, partly through his work with the US Senate Special Committee on Aging and the Center for Law and Social Policy, and partly through his own writing. Within days of his appointment, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his book Why Survive? Being Old in America. “The tragedy of old age is not the fact that each of us must grow old and die but that the process of doing so has been made unnecessarily and at times excruciatingly painful, humiliating, debilitating, and isolating through insensitivity, ignorance, and poverty”, he wrote. When Butler and his second wife Myrna Lewis published their book Sex after 60, in 1976, it was considered scandalous by some. Meanwhile, at the NIA Butler set in place a broad programme of basic, biomedical, social, and behavioural research, and established Alzheimer’s disease as a national research priority. “He had superb political skills”, says Daniel Perry, President and CEO of the Alliance for Aging Research, who was a Senate aide at the time. “Bob was extraordinarily adroit politically, his communication skills were superb, as a writer and speaker and integrator of ideas and I think that is exactly what the NIA needed in its formative years.” In 1982, Butler left the NIA to found the Department of Geriatrics and Adult Development at the Mount Sinai Medical Center, the first department of geriatrics in a US medical school. Along the way, he also helped found the Alzheimer’s Disease Association, the American Association of Geriatric Psychiatry, the American Federation for Aging Research and, in 1990, the International Longevity Center USA. “As a man, he was one of the kindest, gentlest people I’ve ever known”, Olshansky says, “with a razor-sharp intelligence that was beyond compare. And he only got smarter the older he got. He was intellectually curious about everything.” Butler’s survivors include four daughters and six grandchildren.
Stephen Pincock [email protected]
www.thelancet.com Vol 376 August 21, 2010
AP
The printed journal includes an image merely for illustration
Robert Neil Butler Gerontologist and founding director of the US National Institute on Aging. He was born on Jan 21, 1927, in New York, NY, USA and died of leukaemia on July 4, 2010, aged 83 years. In November last year, Robert Butler travelled to Dubai to co-chair a meeting for the World Economic Forum’s Council on the Ageing Society. When the official proceedings had wrapped up, his co-chair, Jay Olshansky from the University of Illinois at Chicago, said to the 82-year-old “let’s go and do something neither of us has done before”, Olshansky recalls. Soon enough, the two men were sitting in an ice bar, a venue where all the furniture is made of ice and the air is chilled to below freezing. While the mid-day desert temperatures outside soared, they donned heavy winter coats and chuckled over heated bowls of chicken soup. “He said to me, ‘I love adventures’”, says Olshansky. For more than 50 years, Butler was a champion of the rights of older people to experience the kind of rich and fulfilled life he enjoyed himself. He coined the phrase “ageism” to describe endemic discrimination against the elderly, which led people, he famously wrote, to lead lives of “quiet despair, deprivation, desolation and muted rage”. “Bob Butler was a pioneer who sought to redefine aging, for both individuals and society”, said Director of the National Institute on Aging (NIA) Richard J Hodes. “He challenged the status quo, looking at what can be achieved in later life, not at what might be lost. The field of ageing 588
research—and anyone seeking a better life with age—has lost a best friend.” Butler’s parents separated when he was 11 months old, and he was raised by his grandparents. In an interview in 2001, he said that his interest in ageism had its roots in his medical school days, when he was disturbed to hear professors refer to older people—people like his grandparents—as “crocks”. “In medical school, every effort was made to introduce us to middle-aged and younger patients, but older patients were considered to be beyond help—in other words, not teaching material”, he added. In the 1950s and 1960s, while working at the National Institute of Mental Health, Butler was involved in one of the first comprehensive, long-term studies of communitydwelling older people, which showed, among other things, that senility is not an inevitable consequence of age. In 1976, after some years of teaching and private practice, he became the founding director of the NIA of the US National Institutes of Health. By that time he had already achieved prominence, partly through his work with the US Senate Special Committee on Aging and the Center for Law and Social Policy, and partly through his own writing. Within days of his appointment, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his book Why Survive? Being Old in America. “The tragedy of old age is not the fact that each of us must grow old and die but that the process of doing so has been made unnecessarily and at times excruciatingly painful, humiliating, debilitating, and isolating through insensitivity, ignorance, and poverty”, he wrote. When Butler and his second wife Myrna Lewis published their book Sex after 60, in 1976, it was considered scandalous by some. Meanwhile, at the NIA Butler set in place a broad programme of basic, biomedical, social, and behavioural research, and established Alzheimer’s disease as a national research priority. “He had superb political skills”, says Daniel Perry, President and CEO of the Alliance for Aging Research, who was a Senate aide at the time. “Bob was extraordinarily adroit politically, his communication skills were superb, as a writer and speaker and integrator of ideas and I think that is exactly what the NIA needed in its formative years.” In 1982, Butler left the NIA to found the Department of Geriatrics and Adult Development at the Mount Sinai Medical Center, the first department of geriatrics in a US medical school. Along the way, he also helped found the Alzheimer’s Disease Association, the American Association of Geriatric Psychiatry, the American Federation for Aging Research and, in 1990, the International Longevity Center USA. “As a man, he was one of the kindest, gentlest people I’ve ever known”, Olshansky says, “with a razor-sharp intelligence that was beyond compare. And he only got smarter the older he got. He was intellectually curious about everything.” Butler’s survivors include four daughters and six grandchildren.
Stephen Pincock [email protected]
www.thelancet.com Vol 376 August 21, 2010