| A man of prodigious diverse capabilities, Dr. Shock was born on Christmas Day in 1906, the son of a professor of mathematics at Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana. He obtained both a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering and a master's degree in organic chemistry from Purdue in 1928. Then, at the University of Chicago, combining psychology and physiology, his 1930 doctoral thesis research established much of what is understood about acid-base balance and carbon dioxide in the blood. In 1932, Shock moved to the Institute of Child Welfare in Berkeley, California, where he spent nearly a decade studying physiological changes in adolescence. |
| In 1914, a Dr. Nasher had published a text on "geriatrics," - a term he coined - mostly a non-scientific description of diseases of old age. Then in 1936, the National Institute of Health was established. In 1941, in an interesting reversal of the usual process, the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation made a one-year grant of $10,000 to the NIH to establish a study of aging, at that time considered a somewhat drastic idea. |
| The search then began for a concentrated population of elderly near an academic center, a clinical medicine site with a sizable long-term care facility and a teaching hospital, of which there were very few. However, the Baltimore City Hospitals, affiliated with both the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University, stood adjacent to a residential farm for the elderly. These were old people who for a variety of reasons - infirmity, homelessness, economic necessity, or distance from family - tended this farm and made it their home. An operative farm with a working dairy, this facility's pasteurization plant processed milk all the way through World War II. |
| The site secured, Dr. Thomas M. Parren, then Surgeon General, called upon Baird Hastings, a nationally influential physiologist and one of the sponsors of Shock's doctoral research, to suggest someone who could initiate such a study. Hastings recommended Nathan W. Shock, who as a student had impressed him with his exceptional rigor in scientific methodology, extraordinary range of interests, and penetrating grasp of disciplines as diverse as design engineering, chemical biology, and developmental psychology. |
| Nathan Shock came from adolescent developmental psychology at Berkeley to gerontology in Baltimore in 1941 - whereupon Pearl Harbor shut down the study almost immediately. |
| Committed early to the study of aging, W. Henry Sebrell, Chief of the NIH Division of Physiology, was another scientist with many intertwining interests whose work "elicited numerous key findings of worldwide significance." A career nutritionist, he helped set up the first international standards of nutrition for the League of Nations in the early 1930s, and was the first scientist to recognize and describe the dietary disease ariboflavinosis. For the duration of World War II, he charged Shock with conducting nutritional studies in rats in an effort to develop vitamin therapy for shell shock victims. |
| At war's end, Shock turned at last to aging. He set up a small lab and wrote a broad cross-sectional study design, one that along with many physiological components, incorporated a strong set of psychological and/or behavioral measures. |
| He also recruited a fellow Hoosier, Arthur Norris, who had similarly far-ranging expertise and strong commitment to strict science, without a doctoral degree, to implement his ideas. Human experimental subjects came from whatever populations were at hand - the elderly in residence on the farm, of course, supplemented by the staff and student populations available through the Hopkins and University of Maryland connections. This was, of course, before the days of consent forms, releases of information, and the many other protection measures that have since proliferated in human research. |
|
| Together with an extremely small staff, they set up in basement offices at the Baltimore City Hospitals and ran a program that included numerous physiological and psychological tests. |
| As the investigation grew, its range of activities came to amount to more work than the support staff could provide. |
| Gradually, however, other scientists were enjoined in the study who could satisfy Shock's insistence on answering what he considered the discipline's two critical questions: "What are the underlying biological factors that produce what we perceive as aging?" and, "What are the mechanisms that produce impaired performance with age?" For aging, he insisted, was not a disease. |
| In 1958, Dr. William W. Peter, an officer of the U.S. Public Health Service since 1918 and a missionary doctor, had retired to Scientists' Cliffs, Maryland, a settlement built on the fossil-laden Cliffs of Calvert where many scientists had retirement residences. He had decided to bequeath his body to science. An inquiry to NIH yielded the suggestion that he consult Dr. Shock. |
| By this time, however, Dr. Shock had become convinced of the need to study community-dwelling people over a number of years of aging - that is, longitudinally - rather than studying individuals' bodies after their deaths. Dr. Peter found the idea intriguing. |
| Together, the two men planned an ambitious longitudinal study of aging, one that would "observe and document the physical, mental, and emotional effects of the aging process in healthy, active people." |
| Armed with the conviction that "People like ourselves, ... living independent lives in the community, should volunteer as subjects for the study of aging, ..." Dr. Peter organized a verbal "chain letter" campaign among the nucleus of early volunteers, asking each recruit to round up other recruits from among family, friends, and neighbors. |
| Thus, the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging came into existence. Considered the most comprehensive study of aging in human subjects ever attempted, it was a totally volunteer effort. Although he insisted on being the Study's first subject, ironically, Dr. Peter died within a year of its initiation. |
| However, by 1965, more than 650 participants had volunteered. By its 30th anniversary, in 1988, more than a thousand volunteers had contributed the data of their individual patterns to the emerging body of findings about human aging. |
| In 1968, the BLSA and its many attendant studies took up residence in new quarters, renamed the Nathan W. Shock Laboratories in 1989. |
| Officially retiring in 1977, Dr. Shock continued his work as Scientist Emeritus until his death in 1989. President of Division 20 of the American Psychological Association in 1952-53, his influence and recognition went well beyond psychology. A recipient of awards from every major national society on aging, he was a founder (with Kornchevsky) and president of the International Association of Gerontological Societies, and a founding member and president of the Gerontological Society of America. |
| In the words of NIA psychologist, Paul T. Costa, Jr., Ph.D., throughout his career Dr. Shock "reconfirmed ... the importance of the fundamental notion that exploration, observation, and description are the ultimate bases of all science ... " |
