Dr. Robert Butler

---

Dr. Robert Butler, a Pulitzer Prize winning expert on aging who coined the word "ageism," died on Sunday at age 83. He was the founding director of the National Institute on Aging, one of the National Institutes of Health, and wrote several books on aging, including the one for which he won the Pulitzer Prize: Why Survive: Being Old in America.

He delved into the implications of aging in our society in another book, The Longevity Revolution. You can read excerpts here.

He was the founding chairman of the first department of geriatrics in the United States, at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and he was the founding president of the International Longevity Center-USA. He also led research that found that senility was not a necessarily outcome of aging. At the time of his death, he was the head of a committee on aging for the World Economic Forum.

Jim Emerman, executive vice president of Civic Ventures and former chief operating officer of the American Society on Aging, said, "As much as any one individual, Bob Butler invented geriatrics. His seminal book, Why Survive? Being Old in America, gave for the first time a name - ageism - to the discrimination people faced as they advanced in years.

"He was probably our most articulate spokesman for the need for training medical professionals in geriatrics, and he never stopped railing against the drastic shortage of physicians and nurses trained to meet the needs of an aging population.

"Bob's interests ranged far and wide. In the last 20 years, the International Longevity Center, which he founded, forged a global path, working to draw attention to the opportunities and challenges of the longevity revolution in the nations of the developed world, and equally significantly, in developing countries where, in not that many years, the vast majority of people over the age of 60 will live. He was a true international statesman for the field of gerontology.”