Editorial: a systematic end to “muddling through”?

Incrementalism is a familiar term in project management. Also sometimes known as ‘‘muddling through’’ or ‘‘baby steps’’ it involves making a steady series of unplanned minor discoveries each of which results in a small step forward. Incrementalism thus contrasts sharply with systematic attempts to make progress. However, it is often a highly effective approach. In many ways research into the biology of ageing itself seems to be a worked example of incrementalism. As the careful work of Park (2008) has demonstrated, the foundation date of the British Society for Research on Ageing (1939–1940) maps very closely to the publication date of Problems of aging (the first multi-authored handbook within the field, edited by Edmund Cowdry). The pre-internet logistics of the publication process brought many of the American authors of that text into contact with Vladimir Korenchevsky, the Oxford based researcher who had founded the BSRA as the ‘‘Club for Ageing’’ and catalysed the formation of an ‘‘American branch’’ of the club which would later become the American Gerontological Society. In an address to the first ever conference of the BSRA at Imperial College in 1946 Korenchevsky told his audience ‘‘the very great difficulty of the problem of ageing must be strongly emphasised. It is as difficult as, or perhaps more difficult than, the splitting of the atom’’ (Korenchevsky 1946). He was right. Looking back over the various books which followed Problems of aging, including Korenchevsky’s own Physiological and pathological ageing (1961) and the three editions of Comfort’s The biology of senescence (1956, 1964 and 1979) it is difficult to describe progress towards ‘‘splitting the gerontological atom’’ as anything other than incremental. Some scientists outside the field ascribed this lack of progress to simple scientific incompetence. At a symposium organised by the BSRA with the Society for Experimental Biology in Sheffield one researcher remarked that ‘‘a professional biochemical team could have sorted all this out in a fortnight’’ (Comfort 1967). Since this exchange took place in the year in which one of us was born we express genuine regret that the relevant professionals didn’t show up. They could have saved us all a great deal of effort. Scientific intractability rather than conspicuous stupidity was the real problem faced by the early gerontologists. Korenchevsky’s atom could not be split with the techniques that were then available. It needs to be remembered that the BSRA was founded before Avery and his co-workers demonstrated that DNA was the ‘‘transforming principle’’ for virulence in Pneumococcus (1944) and the structure of the double helix itself was only 3 years old when The biology of senescence first appeared (anyone wanting direct support for semiconservative DNA replication R. Faragher (&) E. Ostler School of Pharmacy and Biomolecular Sciences, University of Brighton, Huxley Building, Brighton BN2 4GJ, UK e-mail: rgaf@brighton.ac.uk