Free Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study by George E. Vaillant Page B

picturesque symptoms or transcriptions of the meaning in traditional terms.” As the sagas of Adam Newman and Godfrey Camille have already made clear, the Grant Study made Meyer’s dream a reality. Originally planned to last fifteen to twenty years—a mightily ambitious goal even today—it has now been making “records of lifetimes” for seventy-five years.
    America’s greatest physiologist, Walter Cannon, was at the conference too. Like Meyer, Cannon has been a role model for the Study throughout its existence. It was he who formulated the concept of the fight-or-flight response, and as a Harvard professor he wrote a classic monograph on physiological homeostasis,
The Wisdom of the Body.
5 Psychological homeostasis has been an enduring concern of the Grant Study, and I chose the title of my book
The Wisdom of the Ego
in homage to Cannon. 6
    President James Conant was present; he led Harvard through World War II, and served—importantly if less publicly—as civilian administrator of the Manhattan Project, where he opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb. Arlie Bock was there too.
    Arlen Vernon Bock, once described by the Harvard Gazette as “blond, brisk, brusque, benign, belligerent, and always busy,” was a no-nonsense physician. 7 He had grown up one of eleven children on a farm in Iowa, and Harvard Medical School accepted him even though no one on the admissions committee had ever heard of his college. Bock began his career in the 1920s with a Moseley Traveling Fellowship for the study of medicine in Europe, following which he undertook a study of the physiological adaptation of men living in the high Andes. This experience led to his interest in physical fitness and positive health.
    Bock and his colleague John W. Thompson (also at the conference) were pioneers in the study of normal human physiology, and in 1926 had helped found the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory, where physiologists,biologists, and chemists studied men’s ability to adapt to physical stress. There they developed a technique of exercising subjects by having them step on and off locker-room benches, which is still part of modern cardiac testing. 8 The Laboratory was officially located on the campus of the Graduate School of Business Administration, but it sent teams traveling around the world, from the tropics of the Canal Zone to the Andean peaks. Its work eventually led to the decision of the United States Air Force to equip its new high-altitude bombers with supplementary oxygen.
    Bock had an expansive vision, and he never stopped inveighing against medicine’s tendency to think small and specialized. Writing to accept the directorship of the Harvard Department of Hygiene, he asserted that medical research paid too much attention to sick people, and that dividing the body up into symptoms and diseases could never shed light on the urgent question of how to live well. It was he who first conceptualized the concept of positive health; sixty years later, University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman would take Bock’s challenge into the new field of study we call positive psychology.
    Even after the Grant Study got under way Bock’s close affiliation with the Fatigue Lab continued, and it’s worth noting that he himself walked two miles a day until his death at 96. He never forgot that “normal” and “average” are not the same thing—20/20 eyesight is normal, but unfortunately not average—and his interest was not in elucidating average fitness, but the best fitness possible. To accomplish this, it seemed sensible at the time to study an elite sample of men. And that’s what the Grant Study did.
    For its first seventeen years (from its beginnings in 1937–1938 until Charles McArthur assumed the directorship in 1955), the Study was dominated by its founder Arlie Bock, its first director, Clark Heath, M.D., and its social investigator, Lewise Gregory. It was the dedication and kindness of these three people that created