Remembering our roots: a recipe for the future.

Science moves forward as scholars build on the work of those who preceded them. Students are taught that familiarity with the literature allows an investigator to avoid needless repetition of work that has been done before and to contribute something new. Citations to earlier work provide support for the validity of arguments and avenues for interested readers to pursue. Against this fundamental principle of science lies the daunting reality of most publications, The Gerontologist included, whose rigid word counts must be adhered to, and whose concerns about impact factors favor citation of recent publications over those of older and even classic works. A common, highly undesired result is that we as a discipline forget our past. We forget our forefathers and foremothers, and the fundamental ideas that shaped our discipline are relegated to the back burner. With this issue of The Gerontologist, we encouraged scholars to reach back and reconsider where we came from, how our science developed, and how the ideas and seminal contributions of our academic ancestors influence how we think about aging today. We asked that authors identify and point readers to groundbreaking contributions that must be remembered and understood by seasoned researchers as well as emerging scholars. We suggested that manuscripts focus on individuals whose work launched our discipline or steered it in a critical direction, on the constructs and theories that form the fundamentals of gerontology, and on the broad range of methods by which scientific knowledge was generated. This issue contains the fruit of the scholars who answered our call. As a collection, the articles examine the lives of some of the people and the foundations of some of the institutions that formed the roots of our discipline. The authors highlight the history of a diversity of concepts and themes and they remind us that gerontology is a science rooted in the goal of making life better for older people. But they have gone even farther than I had imagined. Together, these articles provide the ingredients and recipe for guiding the future of gerontology.