Alex Comfort Research Articles

"Post-Protean" Public Health and the Geroscience Hypothesis.

Despite unprecedented investments in public health and biomedical research, improvements in life expectancy and healthy life expectancy have stagnated in the United States. Part of the reason for this development can be traced back to the influence of "Protean" over "Post-Protean" public health, the names that can be given to two contrasting visions of public health advanced in the early twentieth century. Protean public health prescribes "waging a war" against disease and was successful in reducing the early-life mortality risks from infectious disease. But Protean public health has proven less effective in improving the quality of life of older persons. Post-Protean public health prioritizes the experimental method and research into the indirect methods of improving health. It articulated a vision of public heath that was given a more concrete specification by Alex Comfort in what is now referred to as the Geroscience Hypothesis. To improve the health prospects of aging populations the dominance of Protean public health must be relaxed, to enable the benefits of Post-Protean public health to be realized. Doing so means shifting public health's aspirations towards increasing the healthspan vs "saving lives" by extending the duration of time older persons can survive by managing the multi-morbidities of late life.

Aging, DNA Information, and Authorship: Medawar, Schrödinger, and Samuel Butler

Eminent scientists are well-placed to bring the novel works of others, even if not in their own areas of expertise, to general attention. In so doing, they may be able to extend original accounts or introduce new terminologies, but they are basically messengers, not innovators. In the 1940s an evolutionary theory of biological aging was explained by Peter Medawar, and informational concepts relating to DNA were explained by Erwin Schrodinger. Both explanations were eventually traced back to the Victorian polymath Samuel Butler—one by Medawar’s research associate Alex Comfort, and the other, albeit indirectly, by Schrodinger himself. In his time Butler’s works were too erudite for general readers and too laden with populist jargon for contemporary experts to take seriously. However, today it appears counterfactually plausible that an early acceptance of his ideas would have greatly quickened the pace of research.

Pacifism, Realism, and Pathology: Alex Comfort, Cecil Collins, and Neo-Romantic Art during World War II

Pacifism, Realism, and Pathology:Alex Comfort, Cecil Collins, and Neo-Romantic Art during World War II Mark Antliff (bio) "The lessons of the war" are "the lessons of romantic ideology, of responsibility, of disobedience": so wrote the anarchist, poet, and conscientious objector Alex Comfort in his manifesto Art and Social Responsibility: Lectures on the Ideology of Romanticism published in 1946 in the immediate aftermath of World War II (fig. 1).1 In this book and a related series of wartime essays Comfort declared his anti-Statist, anti-capitalist definition of romanticism the moving force not only behind the aesthetics of his generation, but of the anti-war production of artists as distinct as the contemporary fantasist Cecil Collins—a prominent figure in Britain's wartime Neo-Romantic movement—and the sixteenth century Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder (fig. 2). Thus in the midst of World War II when the Neo-Romantic movement in Britain was at its zenith, Comfort reconfigured romantic aesthetics as a form of ethical and pacifist protest against all wars, and specifically against what many still consider the most just war in history. As I will demonstrate, Comfort's thesis in Art and Social Responsibility was premised on a complex theory of "romantic realism" and the aesthetics of anarchist resistance, which he brought to bear not only on the work of Bruegel and Collins, but in a cogent critique of surrealism and constructivism.2 In analyzing Comfort's Neo-Romantic project, I will pay particular attention to his writings on the visual arts which have been overlooked despite their centrality to his definition of anarchist romanticism.3 At its wartime height the Neo-Romantic movement [End Page 519] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Frontispiece Photograph of Alex Comfort, reproduced in Art and Social Responsibility: Lectures on the Ideology of Romanticism (London: Falcon Press, 1946). Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 2. Photograph of Cecil Collins in front of 'The Joy of Worlds' at Swann Cottage, Totnes, Devon, c. 1937, reproduced in Cecil Collins: Paintings and Drawings (1935–1945) (Oxford: Counterpoint Productions, 1946). [End Page 520] numbered Michael Aryton, John Craxton, John Minton, Henry Moore, John Piper, Graham Sutherland, and Keith Vaughan among its luminaries. Most art historical writing has productively addressed the Neo-Romantic project through a focus on landscape painting as a metaphor for "Englishness," as a form of insular, national resilience under the wartime threat of Nazi Germany, and with regard to the role of government institutions in promoting the movement at home and abroad after 1942.4 Martin Hammer has greatly enriched the literature on Neo-Romanticism through his comprehensive study of Graham Sutherland, arguably the major progenitor of the romantic revival during the 1930s, demonstrating that Sutherland developed an aesthetic language of ambiguity and equivocation in his work so as to resist any singular or one-dimensional interpretation of his painting.5 Tim Barringer, Margaret Garlake, and David Mellor have drawn valuable attention to the more radical aspects of the Neo-Romantic group with reference to such artists as Sutherland and Piper, Moore, the composer Benjamin Britten, and a younger generation of wartime artists including Vaughan, Minton, Aryton, and Craxton. Barringer, in a compelling article on the pacifist Britten, has examined the "creative tension" in Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings (1943) and his opera Peter Grimes (1945) between the reactionary and progressive dimensions of British romanticism, evidenced by the dual impact of Samuel Palmer and William Blake on Britten's Neo-Romantic self-fashioning and evolving aesthetics.6 Garlake, citing the Christian anarchist Derek Savage, has briefly noted the links between the wartime "Apocalyptics, Surrealists, Neo-Romantics and Anarchists" as well as advocates of the philosophy of Personalism, but she does not analyze the ideological positions held by these unnamed protagonists.7 Instead she reaches more general conclusions, noting that such thinking partially accounts for the primacy given to the individual in Neo-Romanticism, which took pictorial form in the guise of a particularized, empathetic relationship with a landscape that was alternatively nurturing, overwhelming, constricting, and an imagined place of refuge amidst the chaos of war.8 Thus while Garlake points to "thematic...

Anticipatory measure: Alex Comfort, experimental gerontology and the measurement of senescence

Ageing is routinely measured by counting the number of years lived since the birth of an individual but at least since at least the 1930s, the validity, precision and sensitivity of chronological age as a measure has been criticised across the biological and behavioural sciences of ageing. This quest that has been reinforced by the contemporary investment in the possibility of technologically manipulating the rate of ageing to delay the onset the age-associated diseases. This paper explores the epistemic, institutional and political conditions that led to the formulation, at the turhn of the 1970s, of Alex Comfort's (1920–2000) seminal proposal to measure human biological ageing rate. Drawing on published and archival sources, I argue that Comfort's suggested measure of ageing can be understood as a form of ‘anticipation work’, and should be understood as an effort to evidence, and to make present, the technological and social promises that Comfort linked to experimental gerontology.

Memento Mori and gerontography

ABSTRACTNovels are so often identified with development and Bildung – all implicitly about youthful characters in search of experience – that the representation of old age may be classed as an anti-novelistic phenomenon. In Memento Mori, Muriel Spark focuses on a group of characters over 70 years old in order to weigh the physiological and spiritual dimensions of ageing. Her working notes for the novel, now archived at the University of Tulsa, indicate that she researched her subject by dipping into Adolf Vischer’s Old Age: Its Compensations and Rewards (1947) and Alex Comfort’s The Biology of Senescence (1956). She reworked a considerable amount of material from these sources into the plot and phrasing of Memento Mori. In this early novel, Spark elaborates a novelistic gerontography, which I define as the textual representation of old age that accounts for a humane, non-scientific experience of age.

Sex and the Me Decade: Sex and Dating Advice Literature of the 1970s

Sex and the Me Decade:Sex and Dating Advice Literature of the 1970s Anna E. Ward (bio) In an article published in 1976 in New York magazine, author and journalist Tom Wolfe declared the arrival of the “Me Decade,” arguing, “The old alchemical dream was changing base metals into gold. The new alchemical dream is: changing one’s personality—remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self … and observing, studying, and doting on it” (1988, 143). Wolfe highlights sex and sexuality as a key component of this “new alchemical dream,” and indeed, the 1970s saw a solidification of self-help and therapeutic approaches to sex and sexuality aimed at self-exploration and personal transformation. This solidification is particularly noticeable within the booming dating and sex advice literature market of the 1970s. In stark contrast to earlier iterations of this genre, these texts helped establish a market for individually oriented relationship and sex guides that encourage the notion that sex is a constitutive part of identity formation and a critical element of self-awareness. Given the considerable scholarly attention paid to the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s in the United States, the 1970s is often treated as merely an extension of the previous decade, or as a dramatic and unfortunate reversal of gains made in the 60s. This lack of attention to the specificity of the 1970s is troubling for two reasons. First, the 1970s was a decade of profound shifts in the terrain of sexual and gender politics in the U.S., including the two landmark Supreme Court cases Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972) and Roe v. Wade (1973); the publication of William Masters and Virginia Johnson’s Human Sexual Inadequacy (1970), Shere Hite’s The Hite Report: A Nationwide Report on Female Sexuality (1976), Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex (1972), and the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective’s Women and Their Bodies: A Course (1970); [End Page 120] and the release of Deep Throat (1972). The decade was also marked by high-profile battles over the Equal Rights Amendment and sexual orientation antidiscrimination legislation; both issues generated considerable steam for what would become a powerful force in U.S. politics—the religious right and its insistent invocation of sexual and gender politics as wedge issues in the American political landscape. Second, the 1970s was a vitally important decade for specifically feminist and lesbian and gay inquiry into sex and sexual politics, in which both domains (and their overlaps) exerted considerable pressure on popular sexual discourse. To ignore the 1970s as a distinct era of sexual thought in the U.S. is to miss an opportunity to understand the legacies of feminist and queer activism and scholarship and their continuing import for contemporary sexual politics. Revisiting the 1970s as feminist scholars may help illuminate contemporary struggles around sex and their feminist and queer implications. If the 1970s tends to be overlooked more generally, the role of dating and sex advice literature of this era, in particular, is grossly underexamined within feminist and sexuality studies, garnering significantly less attention than early- and mid-twentieth-century marriage manuals. While sales figures alone cannot help us gauge the impact these manuals had on people’s sexual behavior, the impressive circulation of texts like Comfort’s The Joy of Sex, for example, suggests that this literature struck a cultural nerve. The purchase and circulation of texts such as Comfort’s is, in and of itself, a behavior that warrants scholarly attention, particularly given that these texts had to be acquired in brick-and-mortar shops. The acquisition of guides such as these suggests a public increasingly interested in pursuing sexual knowledge, and titillation, beyond the bounds of traditional sexual and gender norms. In this essay, I first trace a brief history of sex advice literature in the U.S., demonstrating that the 1970s literature marks a distinct shift in tone, audience, and content from the literature of earlier decades. I then examine sex and relationship advice literature of the 1970s, considering mass-market literature alongside feminist writings on sexuality during the decade in order to unearth the connections between the two domains. By closely examining 1970s dating and sex advice literature...

Sex in Utopia:

ABSTRACT In this article we explore two sex-related questions. First, what have the authors of utopias and dystopias said about sexual behavior and relationships in their works? In examining this question, we seek to identify different modes of sexual behavior or relationships that have been presented as characterizing the good or bad society. Second, what is the role of sex in utopia and dystopia? Is there a sexual element of how to get from here to there? Can changes in sexual behavior and relationships help bring about the good society? In order to explore these questions we consult a large number of primary sources, and our discussion begins with a broad-brush survey that establishes some early norms and variations from the canon of utopian thought. Two recurrent themes emerge from this survey: the first concerns a tripartite relationship among sex, sexuality, and gender. The second concerns sex and control. Both themes reinforce key modes of sexual behavior, which are explored in the final section of the article, where we undertake a deeper consideration of sample texts from three authors: Marge Piercy, Robert Rimmer, and Alex Comfort.

A Real Short Introduction to Classical Reception Theory

A Real Short Introduction to Classical Reception Theory JAMES TATUM There used to be a large bookstore in New York specializing in books and journals for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered readerships. There I once happened upon a publication that at first glance promised to be a Nostradamus prophecy for future studies in the history of human sexuality. It could also have had important connections with today’s thinking about the literature and culture of ancient Greece and Rome. To understand how all this came about I will need to begin with some bibliography. I make no apology for doing this. Everything has its specialized literature, not least bookstores, and for bookstores properly considered the dominant literary form is not so much the books being sold as the bibliographies that guide booksellers in their selections. Sometimes disdained for being of interest only to narrow specialists or retiring scholars, bibliography can in fact be as exciting and engaging as any poem or novel if the right questions are asked of it. the tale of the floating signifier I never met a language I didn’t like. —Will Rogers how-to-do-it manuals are a popular subject for such emporiums , and this book store in Manhattan dedicated to its LGBT clientele was more ecumenical than most. The full range of human sexuality was well represented, its parade of titles starting with copies of the latest edition of Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex. The many recipes about what it is possible to do with female and male bodies had made Joy a arion 22.2 fall 2014 best seller for years. (“Since 1972, more than 8 million people have come to this wise, witty, and uninhibited bestselling guide to lovemaking and found all they wanted to know about achieving greater sexual satisfaction.”) And these were recipes in no figurative sense, but candid how-to-do-it scenarios , each one focusing on every human orifice and useful body part, with detailed advice about the combinations possible for imaginative love-making. The Joy of Sex with its batterie de cuisine was a direct imitation of Irma Rombauer’s 1931 book The Joy of Cooking, probably the most influential and widelyread cookbook in America from the time it was published to the present, its only possible rival being the two volumes of Julia Child and her French colleagues’ Mastering the Art of French Cooking. As in Rombauer’s Joy there was also consoling advice about what to do in emergencies, as when a fallen soufflé is the unforeseen outcome of much preparation. There was also the revised edition of Doctor David Reuben’s 1969 bestseller Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask). It was an important predecessor for Comfort’s Joy, but it was not really a cookbook. Everything You Always Wanted to Know was aimed at readers who might be inhibited, inexperienced, or outraged by every aspect of human sexuality. Reuben’s book is still in print but is now best remembered as the inspiration of Woody Allen’s 1972 film with the same title. Allen concocted a series of mini-dramas inspired by the questions the good doctor had used to organize his book. Reuben imagined his patients and readers seeking answers to such inquiries as “Do Aphrodisiacs Work?” and “What Are Sex Perverts?” An appropriately climactic finale finds Woody and the male members of his cast dressed as cavorting sperm cells, to answer the question “What Happens During Ejaculation?” The most moving episode is the answer to the question, “What is sodomy?” Gene Wilder plays a successful Upper East Side MD who is visited one day by an Armenian shepherd in love with a sheep named “Daisy.” It happened because of all those lonely nights in the mouna real short introduction 76 tains, the shepherd explains. He would like to be cured of this love affair and a cousin in America had told him about the good doctor. Wilder at first resists, but finally sees her and unexpectedly falls for Daisy himself. In an increasingly reckless cycle of clandestine assignations and intimate dinners in elegant New York hotels he finally loses everything for the...

What is Aging?

In 1991, the book Evolutionary Biology of Aging offered the following definition of aging: a persistent decline in the age-specific fitness components of an organism due to internal physiological deterioration (Rose, 1991). This definition has since been used by others a number of times. However, it was only a modest generalization of a definition proffered by Alex Comfort over three editions (1956–1979) of his key book The Biology of Senescence (Comfort, 1979): “a progressive increase throughout life, or after a given stadium, in the likelihood that a given individual will die, during the next succeeding unit of time, from randomly distributed causes.” The 1991 definition chiefly added reproductive fitness components to Comfort's definition, while adding the qualifiers that the fitness-component decline should be persistent and should be “due to internal physiological deterioration,” where the latter phrase was meant fairly broadly. Thus increases in mortality with age due to chronic infections such as HIV/AIDS were excluded by the 1991 definition.

The Sex of Joy: A Gourmet Guide to Lovemaking Rhetoric

In turbulent times in U.S. sexual history, Alex Comfort's popular sex manual The Joy of Sex: A Gourmet Guide to Lovemaking served up an exciting yet reassuring menu of sexual practice. More than simply reflecting attitudes, The Joy of Sex participated in shaping the discourses of sex and sexuality of its day. This rhetorical and cultural critique of The Joy of Sex argues that the variety and arrangement of its recipe-book-like entries, compelling illustrations, and other rhetorical elements dramatized and sold an idealized heterosexuality to readers but reduced the meaning of “lovemaking” in the process.

The Joy of Aging: Alex Comfort and the Popularization of Gerontology

Alex Comfort is remembered as the author of the bestselling The Joy of Sex. This versatile and prolific writer, however, also had a distinguished career as a gerontologist, producing many research papers on longevity, publishing important textbooks on the biology of aging and on geriatric psychiatry, and popularizing gerontology in a variety of books and essays for the general public. Exploring a range of his writings—from textbooks to essays, book reviews and magazine articles—this essay will focus on how Comfort drew upon the roles of scientific researcher, doctor, and polemicist to create a series of narratives on aging.

Alex Comfort (1920-2000) known and unknown. A personal account.

Alex Comfort (1920-2000) known and unknown. A personal account.

A consideration of some notable aging theories.

Aging is characterized as a breakdown process and the relevant events occur after reproduction, when the force of natural selection declines. Studies on the life histories of species reveal that there is an association between resource allocation and longevity and that the aging process is retarded when animals are protected from the deleterious consequences of excess metabolic activity. Although the extent to which aging is caused by environmental or genetic factors is unresolved, our understanding of the field has been enriched by the rapid development of the tools of molecular biology. In his pioneering work, Alex Comfort has postulated a hierarchical clock system as a descriptive paradigm of the aging process, and investigations at the molecular level are bringing to light evidence of a genetic link to life span that seems consistent with Comfort's model. It appears however, that the appropriate context for these mechanistic observations of functional decline is in the postreproductive period.

The biocultural paradigm: the neural connection between science and mysticism.

New discoveries in perceptual psychology, brain chemistry, brain evolution, brain development, ethology, cultural anthropology, the more recent work of MacLean on the structure of the brains and the discovery by Gazzaniga of the role of the, so-called, "interpreter module," are the foundations of a new paradigm on human cortical information processing, called by its discoverer, Dr. M. Colavito, the "biocultural paradigm." This paradigm shows that biology and culture act on one another as the conditioning parameters of neurocultural information. Through mutual interaction biology in humans becomes culture, and vice versa, culture opens and stimulates the neural passages of the brains, accounting thus for the varieties of brains in humans, and for cultural diversity. Culture conditions and stimulates biology, while biology conditions and makes culture possible. Cultures and brains may be distinguished from one another through identification with certain functions or combination of functions that are exercised habitually, or become neural hard-wire through repetition or habit. This new model has replaced older and simpler models of the nature/ nurture controversy, such as the unextended rational substance of Descartes, the tabula rasa of Locke, the associated-matrix of Hume, the passive, reinforcement-driven animal of Skinner, and the genetically hard-wired robot of the sociobiologists. However, elements of these earlier models are included in the new one, but the conversation about human experience has changed, and, therefore, the human images of ourselves. This change was forced on scientists by the importance of the conditionality of the experience of "I" and "not-I" as described by Alex Comfort in his book I and That, and was introduced in the conversations some of us already had with each other. This article focuses on the "I" and "not-I" experiences with a description of the "not-I" or "oceanic" or "mystical" experience to clarify the new paradigm of "biocultures."

Evolution and dietary restriction.

Placing lifespan in the context of the life history of an organism, Alex Comfort's work has stimulated the analysis of dietary restriction (DR) and its effects on lifespan in an evolutionary context. DR results in the curtailment of energy-intensive nonfood-gathering activities, increased efficiency of food utilization, an increase in food acquisition activity, an increase in the reproductive lifespan, and an increase in the protection of genomic integrity. These result in further refinement of the Adaptive-Longevity Related Process Theory of the effects of dietary modulation to include increased protection of the genomic integrity of cells that result from delayed reproduction, and increased ability to compete for available food. These effects are discussed in the context of the "spacecraft" metaphor for the evolution of senescence. Also, the apparent paradox that increased body weight seems to be directly correlated to survival across species and inversely correlated to survival within a species is discussed in light of the importance of the cephalization index (a modified ratio of brain weight to body weight) for longevity.

Alex Comfort's biology of ontology: implications for gerontology, phenomenology and the philosophy of science.

Alex Comfort's explorations into the biology of the human experiences of self-consciousness and the Oceanic opened avenues of investigation and speculation that deserve reconsideration. His work on the biology of ontology remains valuable, and especially noteworthy is his challenge to make such approaches the basis for a new paradigm of science.

Alex Comfort and the measure of aging.

Alex Comfort and the measure of aging.

Impaired natural killer cell function as a consequence of aging.

Alex Comfort wrote (1979): "... nobody needs long-lived mice." His point was, of course, that as much as possible, research should be done with humans "... who are the beneficiaries in mind ..." In this paper we hope to show that long-lived mice have been useful, if not essential, for conducting studies on the aging of innate immunity, specifically the NK cell component of the system. NK cells are activated early in the course of Trypanosoma musculi infections, which we employ as a model. We have generated evidence that the relatively severe infections of aged mice with T. musculi, are attributable, in part, to (a) functionally defective NK cells, the defect(s) being retained by LAK cells that arise from them, and (b) deficient amounts of IL-2 required to convert NK to LAK cells. Defective macrophages, which are the effector cells responsible for eliminating T. musculi, may also accumulate in aged animals. We postulate that the functionally deficient NK cells fail to generate adequate amounts of IFN gamma (and perhaps, TNF alpha) to optimally activate macrophages. This inadequacy can explain the weak ability of aged mice to control the early stage of T. musculi infection preceding the appearance of the more slowly-developing acquired immune response.

Children of the elderberry bush (for Alex Comfort).

Children of the elderberry bush (for Alex Comfort).

Aging, the fishy side: an appreciation of Alex Comfort's studies.

Many years ago, Alex Comfort experimentally refuted Bidder's hypothesis that fish potentially were immortal. Later morphological and physiological studies, together with observations from fish populations in the wild, revealed that fish age in a way similar to that in other vertebrates. More recently, assessments of the age of fish have been revised, and have shown that some species live much longer than was estimated. These findings, together with the difficulties of demonstrating any increase in the rate of mortality with age in the long-lived, heavily exploited populations of fish, revived Bidder's ideas. I briefly review some of the more recent literature, and conclude that there is no evidence to suggest that fish are exceptional; like other vertebrates, sooner or later they grow old and die.