The Stanford Center on Longevity was launched a little over a year ago. In a sense, however, its origins go back to a hospital room in Rochester, N.Y., where a 21-year-old woman was recovering from an automobile accident that left her with 20 different fractures, some of them serious.
“I was in very, very bad shape,” Laura Carstensen recalls. She was placed in a four-bed room in the orthopaedic ward for four months. “Lying on your back 24/7, you can get bored. When I complained, my Dad said I could take a college course. My first college course ever was in a hospital.”
She was lucky. Her father is Edwin Carstensen, a senior scientist in the electrical engineering department and an emeritus professor at the University of Rochester—“a professor, and also a saint,” his daughter adds. The accident gave him an opening he’d been looking for: he taped lectures in introductory psychology for his non-college-bound daughter. “I had been a wild teenager, rebellious. I wasn’t headed to Stanford, that’s for sure,” she says. “But when I did finally get this opportunity to turn to serious education, it was like candy to me. I never stopped.”
“Everything I was reading in psychology seemed to have relevance to me in my life,” Carstensen recalls. In particular, she was verifying “behavioral confirmation”—a fancy way of saying that the way we treat people draws certain behaviors from them. “If we treat people as if they are dependent, they tend to act dependently,” she observes.
“I saw that in this room with old ladies. I was being rehabilitated; they were being maintained, at best. The therapist would come in and work with me, and wave at Sadie on the way out.
“I had always thought of aging as a biological process, and it is, but had not realized how much is conditioned by social context,” she continues. “How much of aging is driven by biology, how much driven by the social context in which we age?”
Eventually, Carstensen went to graduate school to study aging, and received her doctorate from West Virginia University in 1983.
Twenty-one years later, Carstensen had another lucky break when legendary investor Richard Rainwater happened to read Stanford’s article about aging, “New Age Thinking” (July/August 2004). Rainwater, MBA ’68, has been called a “capitalist cowboy . . . leading the way into new frontiers of finance.” The son of a Lebanese wholesale grocer, he catapulted the family fortune to more than $5 billion.
Rainwater’s next move was characteristic. He picked up the phone and cold-called Laura Carstensen. With one conversation, the Stanford Center on Longevity was born.
“He said, ‘Okay, go do it,’” recalls Carstensen. “We wouldn’t have the center if not for Richard Rainwater. We’d be sitting around talking about how bad things are. Like everyone else.” Rainwater pledged $10 million. With additional support from the president’s office, the center is assured of funding for its critical first five years.
