Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study Read Online Free Page A

Newman’s masturbatory history than in his social life at college. They took pains to classify him as
cerebrotonic,
as opposed to
viscerotonic
or
somatotonic.
(These terms imply constitutional distinctions between people who live by the intellect, by the senses, and by physical vigor, but they were never satisfactorily defined.) It’s also worth noting here, and it will come up again, that the early Study designers never put to the test their deep belief that body build is destiny. That had to wait for many years, even though opportunities for an empirical trial soon became available.
    As a nineteen-year-old sophomore, Newman took a hard line on sex. He condemned masturbation, and he boasted to the Study psychiatrist that he would drop any friend who engaged in premarital intercourse. The psychiatrist noted in his turn, however, that although Adam disapproved of sexual activity, he was “frankly very much interested in it as a topic of thought.” Newman told the psychiatrist a dream, too: two trees grew together, their trunks meeting at the top to form a chest with two drawers side by side, suggestive of a naked woman. He would wake from this dream, which visited him repeatedly, filled with anxiety.
    To my mind, there was no adolescent in the Study who better exemplified psychoanalytic ideas about repressed sexuality than Adam Newman. And it was typical of the Grant Study’s approach at the time that while Freud’s theories were carefully explained to Newman (who vigorously rejected them), no one asked him about dating or friendships.
    He was as dogmatic politically as he was sexually, and he regularly tore up the “propaganda” he received from the “sneaky” college Liberal Union. He claimed a commitment to empirical science both as an idea and as a career, but he also remained a practicing Catholic, attending Mass four times a week. When an interviewer wondered how his religious and scientific views fit together, he replied, “Religion is my private refuge. To attack it with my intellect would be to spoil it.” More contradiction.
    It wasn’t until ten years later, when the scientific climate had shifted away from physical anthropology toward social psychology, and relationships had become a matter of interest, that the Study recorded that Newman had had few close friends in college besides his roommate, and that he had dated only rarely. In part this may have been because Adam was working to pay all of his college expenses himself, and was also sending money home to his fatherless family. But it’s also true that he met early a Wellesley College math major who would become his wife and “best friend forever.”
    Adam went to medical school at Penn. He didn’t want to minister to the sick, but he did want to study biostatistics and avoid the draft. He married during his second year there, but except for his wife he remained rather isolated. He had no more interest in World War II than he had in patient care. On graduation he fulfilled his military obligations with classified research at Edgewood Arsenal, America’s research locus for biological warfare, and he continued in that work after the war. By 1950, Dr. Heath, the Study director, noted that Captain Newman, shaping the Cold War’s nuclear deterrents but never seeing patients, was making more money than any of the other forty-five physicians in the Study. One of Newman’s unclassified papers was “Burst Heights and Blast Damage from Atomic Bombs.”
    Despite these oddities, the record shows that by 1952, when he was thirty-two, Newman was steadily maturing. He was settling into a lifetime career in the biostatistics that he loved, using his leadership talents to build a smoothly running department of fifty people at NASA. His ethical concerns were engaged professionally too; in the 1960s his group participated in President Johnson’s plan to put the military-industrial complex to work on the economic problems of the third world. His marriage would