Peter Pan never grows older, Dorian Gray’s age is frozen, and Dracula is immortal. These fictional characters provided students with starting points for scientific discovery as they traveled through England, Scotland, Ireland and Northern Ireland for a summer course on the genetics of aging.
USC Leonard Davis School Professor Sean Curran led the class and encouraged students to read between the lines and consider whether real-world discoveries could support the fantastical phenomena described in the region’s famous longevity literature.
“Take vampires: They feed on blood and only at night,” said Curran, who is also the school’s vice dean and dean of faculty and research. “The goal was not to prove whether their restricted diet makes them long-lived, but to encourage students to formulate their own hypotheses about aging.”
Students visited castles, cathedrals, lochs and other Atlantic archipelago locations. They also met with leaders of longitudinal studies at universities in Scotland, Belfast and Dublin to understand the importance of measuring population health. Walking through green spaces, taking public transportation and eating local foods also gave students opportunities to gauge how different policies and practices can influence the ability to age well.
“My favorite part of the trip was visiting universities and learning more about what gerontology looks like throughout the different demographics in Europe,” said Amor Mathershed, a current USC Leonard Davis master of science in gerontology student who also earned her bachelor’s degree at the school. “This class provided a great opportunity to examine real-life cases of aging populations on a worldwide scale.”
