Everts Mykytyn, Courtney | USA

Courtney Everts Mykytyn was Fellow at IAS-STS in May and June 2003. Mykytyn completed her undergraduate degree in biological sciences at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. In the autumn of 1998 she began working toward her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology at the University of Southern California. She focuses on medicine, aging and science and her dissertation, entitled “Executing Aging: An Ethnography of Anti-Aging Medicine” examines the anti-aging medicine movement in the United States.

With the assistance of a Wenner Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant and a Center for Feminist Studies Travel Grant, Mykytyn has traveled across the United States conducting her ethnographic research. While working on her dissertation, Mykytyn teach-assists in the departments of anthropology and gerontology at USC and in humanities at Harvey Mudd College. Mykytyn was awarded an Honorable Mention by the Association for Anthropology and Gerontology in 2001 for a paper entitled “Executing Aging Online.” She is pleased to be a fellow for two months at the IAS-STS.

Project at IAS-STS: Anti-Aging Medicine Movement

In the past decade – and most prominently in the past 3-5 years – a movement has developed that aims to locate aging as a target for biomedical intervention. The anti-aging medicine movement, based largely in the United States but gaining in popularity in Europe and Asia, challenges gerontological and traditional frameworks categorizing aging as natural. Anti-aging medicine proponents deem this classification scheme as irrelevant; it matters not what is natural but rather what can be done to improve it. Thus, the physiological aspects of aging fall under the microscope of disease. The portion of the research to be undertaken at IAS-STS is the development of a professi onal geneaology in an effort to uncover the travels of this new definition of aging. This geneaological database will trace relationships between people, books, conferences, websites, e-list-serves, journals, and affiliations. By elucidating the many formal and informal networks in anti-aging medicine, this “kinship” study will illuminate the messy trails of ideas during a point in time in which a revolution in science, medicine and nature seethes below the surface.

Selected Publications

Upcoming: C. Everts Mykytyn: "Anti-Aging Medicine and the Irrelevance of Being Natural: A Patient/Practitioner Movement to Redefine Aging” To be presented at the Patient Organization Movements Symposium, University Gothenburg, Sweden, June 2003 for publication in Social Science and Medicine.

C. Everts Mykytyn: "Anti-Aging Online: The A4M and Honeyed Sheep"
Presentation at the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Medicine Workshop at the California Institute of Technology, Los Angeles, May 2001.

C. Everts Mykytyn: "Situating Aging as Disease"
Presented at the Progress in a Diverse World: The Fifth Annual GPSS Interdisciplinary Conference, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, April 12, 2002.