Date Published: 06-12-2025
Publisher: The Woodtick Press
As both a professional anatomist and a gerontologist, the author is well qualified to write a book on the aging body. Forty years as a professor at the University of Michigan Medical School, he served as Chairman of the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology and also Director of the Institute of Gerontology. For several decades he conducted research on the aging of muscle. He is a past-president of the American Association of Anatomists and of the Association of Anatomy, Cell Biology and Neurobiology Chairpersons.
Getting older happens to everybody. By the time we have reached retirement age,
our body lets us know in no uncertain terms that it is no longer the same body
that we had in the prime of our youth.
Our movements are slower; our joints are creakier; our eyesight and
hearing aren't what they were; our skin begins to sag; and we now get tired
doing things that were effortless a decade or two ago. To make matters worse, we start forgetting
the names of long-time friends or why we went into the kitchen. For some of us, aging is accompanied by
chronic disease, which limits even further our activities and our sense of
well-being. For others, still blessed
with good health, aging is a very gradual process, measured in years, rather
than weeks or months. Healthy aging can
lead to many active years, which are often more fulfilling than the busy and
stressed years of our younger life.
Like
a favorite old car, our aging body doesn't work perfectly all of the time. This is easily measured by the frequency of
trips to the mechanic or the doctor's office.
Even while working well, it requires more frequent tune-ups and more
careful maintenance. Despite that, its
maximum performance is not what it once was.
Nevertheless, a cruise in that old car or a pleasant walk in the woods
provides a sense of contentment that is quite a bit different but often more
pleasurable than the rush provided by the more frenetic activity of our
youth. To extend the car analogy, our
favorite car will last a lot longer and have far fewer problems if it is
subjected to regular inspections and maintenance. We all know people whose car has continued to
function well past 100,000 miles without an oil change or who themselves have
lived to be over eighty while still smoking or drinking regularly and without
ever going to see a doctor. These are
exceptions. Despite anecdotal evidence
to the contrary, most human bodies do require ongoing maintenance and
inspections if they are going to remain functional into old age.
What
constitutes aging? There is no simple
definition. A straightforward measure is
called chronological aging, which is counted in years, months and days. Such a measure is deficient because not all
people appear to age at the same rate.
Take a group of 70-year-olds.
Some look and act like they are 70.
Others look and act like they could be in their 80s whereas others could
be mistaken for 55- to 60-year-olds.
This is referred to as biological aging.
It is often a truer reflection of an individual's aging process than is
that person's chronological age.
Bruce Carlson has had a long and varied career in a number of fields. As an undergraduate student at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota, he majored in biology, languages and chemistry. As a prelude to becoming a fish biologist, he worked for the Minnesota Conservation Department (now DNR) as an aquatic biologist during summers except for one when he conducted research at the University of Georgia Marine Laboratory on Sapelo Island, Georgia. He entered a program in ichthyology at Cornell University, but became fascinated with the phenomenon of regeneration. After receiving an MS from Cornell, he entered the MD-PhD program at the University of Minnesota where he conducted research on limb regeneration in salamanders.
In 1966 he joined the faculty of the Department of Anatomy at the University of Michigan Medical School and became Chairman of the Department and later, Director of the Institute of Gerontology. He taught microscopic anatomy and human embryology and received several major awards for his teaching. His research on regeneration, embryology and muscle biology led him to live for extended periods in five countries – The USSR, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, Finland and New Zealand. A prolific writer, he has written over 200 articles and chapters in scientific publications, has edited 15 symposium articles and translations, and he has written twenty books on a variety of topics.
Bruce is an avid fisherman, who is on the water well over 100 days per year, either night-fishing for walleyes or fly fishing for smallmouth bass in northern Minnesota. He has also taken many trips to New Zealand, his favorite country, to fish for trout in a remote lake surrounded by snow-capped mountains. For many years he wrote articles for several national fishing magazines. The main theme was that the more you understand the biology of the fish you are trying tocatch, the better will be your results.
Since retirement in 2006, Bruce has reverted to his scientific childhood and has again taken up work on fish and lake biology. In addition to weekly collections of data about the lake by his cabin, he has directed a ten-year study on the growth of northern pike on a nearby lake and has spent hundreds of hours taking underwater videos in northern lakes. This activity has led to his writing two popular books on lake biology and one on aquatic invasive species.
In addition to his outdoor work, Bruce has maintained an active professional writing schedule, with seven editions of his book “Human Embryology and Developmental Biology” and other books on regeneration, the human body and muscle biology. His work in the area of embryology has led him into expert witness work in that area and writing a new book on the abortion controversy – “The Abortion Controversy – An Embryologist’s Perspective.” His background in anatomy and the biology of aging has him thinking about writing a new book on understanding the aging body.
https://mybook.to/YourAgingBody
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