Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study (14 page)

In 2005, Robert Waldinger, M.D., a research psychiatrist with a particular interest in intimate relationships, succeeded me as director as the Study. From 2004 to 2006 he re-interviewed and, even better, videotaped consenting married couples and obtained their DNA. In recent years, some of the men have consented to fMRI studies, in an attempt to clarify the positive emotions involved in intimacy. I’ll illustrate
some of his work in
Chapter 6
. Some men have donated their brains to the Study. These are further generous sowings whose value will likely not be appreciated for many years.

SOME NOTES ON FUNDING

Keeping the Grant Study in continuous funds for forty years was an anxiety-provoking challenge, but one that with flexibility, resourcefulness, and some sheer good luck I was able to meet.

Since the Career Research Scientist Award that provided my salary for thirty years included no research funds, in 1971 I wrote to the Grant Foundation requesting $800 to pay the retired Lewise Gregory Davies, now in her seventies, to reenlist recalcitrant Study members once more. At that point we had perhaps seventeen nonresponders. Douglas Bond, former staff psychiatrist to the Grant Study (1942), chairman of the Grant Foundation, dean of Western Reserve Medical School, and son of the Earl Bond who had been advisor to both Arlie Bock and William Grant, came to visit me at Harvard. He listened to my ardent plea on behalf of this uniquely valuable longitudinal study, and then he wrote us a check for $50,000 ($280,000 in 2009 dollars). This astonishing munificence provided the seed money for the grant requests and infrastructure by which we obtained continuous funding for the Grant Study for the next three decades. The timing was fortuitous, because the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism had just opened, and money was relatively plentiful.

Our funding from the NIAAA between 1972 and 1982 required us to pay explicit attention to alcoholism. It also supported the questions in which I had been primarily interested—involuntary coping, relationships, and adult maturation—but the study of alcoholism proved so fascinating that I have given it a chapter of its own (
Chapter 9
).

The
first publication to emerge during my directorship, when the men were about fifty, focused explicitly on prescription drug abuse by the forty-six Study men who became physicians. I used responses from questionnaires and interviews to contrast the frequency of mood-altering drug use and abuse by these men with use and abuse by other Study participants. In this case, the Study’s demographic homogeneity presented a convenient means of obtaining a matched control group for the physicians. The physicians were twice as likely to use and abuse mood-altering drugs as the controls.
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The publication of this paper in the
New England Journal of Medicine
brought attention to the Grant Study, and it also helped me address an important issue in longitudinal research: whether the process of being studied alters the course of participants’ lives. Would the Grant Study doctors, most of whom read the
Journal,
change their self-prescribing behavior in response to my paper? Sadly for them, but happily for my trust in the validity of prospective design, we found ten years later that mood-altering drug abuse had actually increased among the physicians, but not among the controls (who were much less likely to have read the article). Despite my prediction that the doctors would modify their habits (or at least their answers), their misuse of drugs actually got worse. The controls’ did not. This result also confirmed my impression that the men were being remarkably honest in their questionnaires.

In 1983, I published
The Natural History of Alcoholism,
which summarized years of research.
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That same year, to put our next research phase on a more secure financial footing, I accepted an endowed chair in psychiatry at Dartmouth. This meant that Dartmouth would pay my salary, and scarce research funds could be reserved for purposes more interesting than keeping me housed and fed. For ten years the Study moved with its files to Hanover, although it remained the administrative responsibility of Harvard University Health Services.

In
1986 the focus of the Study turned to aging. I was still primarily interested in adaptation, but I was a true Willie Sutton of a researcher, going where the money was. As with the alcohol studies, though, once I learned a little about the subject, I found myself fascinated. And, of course, the matter of aging is absolutely intrinsic to a study of this kind—and to my interest in adult maturation—which was very soon brought vividly home to me.

My first application to the National Institute on Aging was turned down cold. The reason was simple. The proposal’s age-phobic fifty-one-year-old author had offered to follow the men’s aging prospectively—as progressive decline. (I’ll say in my own defense that Shakespeare thought the same way in his youth.) The vigorous seventy-eight-year-old chairman of the NIA research grant committee, eminent gerontologist James Birren, made it abundantly clear that that was not how he viewed aging, and he denied my grant request in no uncertain terms. Forgiving and generative, however, he also undertook to raise my consciousness; and thoroughly chastened but now able to envision aging as a positive process, I rewrote the application. The NIA agreed to fund us, and in 2002 the resulting book,
Aging Well,
captured the inspirational reality of aging as James Birren both imagined and exemplified it. It was a study of the aging process in real time, and it put to scientific rest the negativity of mid-life popular “experts” on aging like Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan. The National Institute on Aging continues to support the Study to this day, and I hope that
Chapter 7
will persuade any readers who happen to doubt it that there are worse things in life than living to ninety.

In 1992, Brigham and Women’s Hospital offered me secure funding, and the Grant Study came home to Boston. It remained at Brigham and Women’s until 2010, when Robert Waldinger, director since 2005, moved it to the Massachusetts General Hospital.

PERSPECTIVES—THEIRS
AND OURS

We at the Study have often been asked what effect the men’s membership in it has had on them. When we’ve asked them, most have said that it had no direct effect on them, and indeed there is little to suggest that it has changed their lives in any major way. But as a group they have enjoyed their participation. In 1943 one man wrote, “The Study impressed me by its thoroughness, its interest in the little things, its ability to make the subject feel a part of it rather than a guinea pig. Now it is a gratifying reassurer and friend.” A second very shy Study member, who had asked the comely but six years older Lewise Gregory to go to the theater with him (she went), wrote, “I feel my friendship with you (the Study) has more than paid back anything that I put into it.” Yet another man wrote, “The very act of being a participant, receiving and pondering the follow-up questionnaires, etc. . . . has made me more self-consciously analytical about my personal development, life choices, career progress, and the like.”

Staff members, of course, have our own answers about how the Study has affected us, and I will illustrate here one effect that the Study had on me. Here follows the story of my engagement with one Study member, Art Miller. It’s a story of detective work, of which there is plenty in an enterprise like this. It’s a story of adaptation. But more than anything, for me it was an object lesson about the dangers of judgment. Precipitous conclusions are a constant danger to incautious scientists, and the story of Art Miller is my best reminder that a long perspective is our only true protection against it.

THE STORY OF ART MILLER

In 1960, Art Miller disappeared. He came back safely from the war, and told John Monks that he had seen no heavy combat. He went to
graduate
school, earned a Ph.D. in Renaissance drama, and became an English professor. His published scholarly essays can still be downloaded with Google’s help. But then he vanished. For twenty years he was the only “lost” member of the Study. It wasn’t until 1980 that I managed to reach his elderly mother, who told me that he had quit his university job long ago and moved to Western Australia, where he was raising his family and teaching high-school drama. I called telephone information in his small town. They sent a man out to his house on a bicycle (things are different in the Outback), only to find that he had moved. The operator called up the headmaster of Miller’s school in the middle of the night so as to be able to call me with the new phone number when it was daytime in Boston. When I called Miller at home and told him that I might be coming to Australia, he sounded delighted and insisted on giving me supper and a bed for the night. This evasive man seemed genuinely interested in seeing me.

When I got to Melbourne and called to schedule a meeting, it was the end of the school term, a difficult time for Art. Nevertheless, he agreed to a visit. When I arrived, his front door was open. A note revealed that he was still at the school play, but a nice dinner was laid out and a cold beer was waiting for me in the icebox. Miller and his wife got back after I had been there about an hour, and as the interview proceeded, we made a significant dent in the bottle of Scotch that I had brought as a house present. He had told me that he had moved to Australia out of disaffection with the United States. For one thing, he was afraid that drugs would endanger his children’s adolescence; he had not liked “the cut” of their friends. For another, he was committedly against the war in Vietnam. There were some nonspecific reasons for his alienation as well; as he put it, “There was so much anger in the air.” I found myself wondering briefly if perhaps he had been running from something.

On the phone calls that followed my visit, Miller was always courteous to me. He never returned another Study questionnaire, however,
and
he never revealed his whereabouts to Harvard. The last time I reached his number, his daughter told me that he had died of cancer.

I puzzled over Miller. Psychiatrists were now seeing PTSD in many of the Vietnam vets, and Miller had been in a war too. But I quickly dismissed this notion. He had reported “combat fatigue” once during the war; had he perhaps exaggerated a bit? The Woods traits attributed to him in college had been
Cultural, Ideational,
and
Creative and intuitive,
and after all, he was a drama professor. In his interview with Monks, he had said that he had not seen sustained combat, and by his own report many of the Grant men had more severe and more prolonged combat histories than he.

The years passed. I formulated various hypotheses, not all of them flattering, for Miller’s elusive behavior. In 2009, I had to reread his chart for this book. There I discovered a scrap of paper entered by Clark Heath, who had traveled to Washington in 1950 to review the men’s military medical records. Fifty-five years after World War II ended, I learned what had happened to Art Miller in the army. Here is his record from an Italian field hospital, beginning on June 13, 1944:

Patient saw 3 or 4 days of combat, remembers killing three Germans. The last he remembers is attacking up hill with men falling, nearby land blasts, then woke up here two days ago. He has no idea as to what happened in the intervening time. On admission, he was acutely disturbed, kept his fists clenched, and threw himself about, calling “Shells! Bombs! I’m afraid!” and no contact could be established.

There was no change on transfer here. He was restless, disturbed, over-responds to minor stimuli, crawls under covers and into fetal position at sounds of planes and there is no response obtained on questioning.

After two electro-convulsions, amnesia and agitation entirely cleared. There is some noise sensitivity, battle dreams,
and
fear of combat remains. He is a mildly shy, sensitive, personality type with a strong sense of duty. . . . From an emotional standpoint he will be of no use whatsoever under combat. . . . I feel that he should be reclassified to limited service, permanent.

July 3, 1945: Reclassified. Normal now.

July 5, 1945: Certificate of honorable discharge. Character excellent.

It had been easy to stand in judgment. I could point to Miller’s noncompliant and passive-aggressive behavior. I could note that he had run away from his family and his country, and that his earned income was as low as any man’s in the Study.

Or I could—and in 2010 I finally did—understand Art Miller’s whole life as a creative example of posttraumatic growth. Many playwrights (Edward Albee and Eugene O’Neill among them) have endured traumatic childhoods or major depressions, and spun gold from this wretched straw. It’s hard to imagine that Art Miller’s students scorned him as a dropout or a victim; on the contrary, they must have greatly enjoyed the drama that this published scholar brought to their small-town school. But it took forty-five years for me to see that truth. And I saw it not by looking back on what Miller had or hadn’t done, but by discovering the prospective entry that one very caring physician had made years before, when the trauma was still fresh and contemporary.

A SELF-PORTRAIT

Since it is I who guided the Study for more than half of its existence, it is fitting that I share some relevant aspects of my own development and the potential biases that grow out of them. I was born in New York City to academic WASP parents and educated at Phillips Exeter
Academy
and Harvard College, where I majored in history and literature and was an editor of the
Lampoon.
I went on to Harvard Medical School with the internalized injunction that teaching and service were good and that business and private practice were bad. And perhaps I put a more than necessarily puritanical spin on this dichotomy, because I remember mocking my professors behind their backs for preferring research to clinical care. I have always considered the
New York Times
to be the source of truth where news is concerned, and politically I usually vote Democratic. Between 1960 and 2009 I lived mostly in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was happily married during most of those years, despite more than one divorce. As I write this book I am recently remarried once again, living in southern California, and learning (reluctantly) to broaden my political perspectives.