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Date: March 12, 1998
Specialist on Aging to Speak on "Why Geriatrics?"
Princeton, N.J. -- Dr. Robert N. Butler, director of the International Longevity Center at the Mount Sinai Medical Center, will give a lecture entitled "Why Geriatrics?" at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs on Monday, March 30, at 4:30 p.m., in Bowl 6 of Robertson Hall.
In 1982 Dr. Butler founded the department of geriatrics at the Mount Sinai Medical Center, the first such department at a U.S. medical school. He served as the department's chair and as a professor until 1995 when he became the full-time director of the U.S. branch of the International Longevity Center (ILC), which he established in 1990. With branches in Tokyo and Paris, the ILC conducts studies of the impact of longevity on society and its institutions--on productivity, health care systems in various countries and on the lives of children.
Dr. Butler was the founding director of the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health (1975-82). His research there helped establish that senility is a consequence of disease, not of aging, and he identified Alzheimer's disease as a national research priority. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and of the National Academy of Social Insurance, a founding fellow of the American Geriatrics Society and vice chair of the Alliance for Aging Research. Dr. Butler is on the national advisory committees of the Physician for Human Rights and of the National Women's Health Resource Center and has been a frequent adviser to the World Health Organization.
In 1976 Dr. Butler won the Pulitzer Prize for Why Survive? Being Old in America and is a coauthor of Aging and Mental Health and of Love and Sex after 60. He is currently working on a new book, The Longevity Revolution.
Dr. Butler's lecture is sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Herman M. ("Red") Somers Lecture Series on Aging.