University Place

cc >>

Paul Rogovitch

Good afternoon, and welcome again to History Sandwiched In. Today's speaker will be talking about Stephen Babcock, EB Hart and the Wisconsin Hunger Fighters. It's professor David Nelson, Professor of Biochemistry here at the university. And you know, when I hear Babcock, I always think of Babcock Hall ice cream. I just want you to know that if you go upstairs to the fourth floor to the Odd Wisconsin exhibit, you'll see a bucket with a long handle on it that Stephen Babcock used to collect cow manure. Right upstairs on the fourth floor. Don't miss it. But please, let's welcome to History Sandwiched In, professor David Nelson. ( applause ) >>

David Nelson

I'm going to spend just a few minutes today setting the background for the history that I want to discuss with you. And the background, from my point of view, is that for many years, I've taught biochemistry to students generally who are juniors or seniors in college. And every year, I tell them about the discoveries in biochemistry over the last century or more. But I almost always realize that for them, this is not real. That is, the students hear about the science, but not about the people. So usually at the end of my course, I ask the students if they happen to know who this guy is, that they've been walking by every single day on the way to class, for a year. It's Stephen Babcock. But most of them either don't know who he is, or haven't any idea why his figure is on the front of the biochemistry department. It turns out that he was an amazing character, and the cause of a major scientific revolution. It took place in Madison around 1913, a revolution that still has echoes, even in today's science. So I want us to look together at that period around 1900 or 1890, when Babcock was here, the College of Agriculture looked something like this. This is, I think, looking from the lake toward Ag Hall, and the several buildings of the Ag campus. But at that time, there were sheep grazing on campus. There were lots and lots of grassy areas, not like it is today. Here's the dairy barn. In fact, in this dairy barn, the famous experiments of Babcock's that I'm about to tell you about, took place. This dairy barn was recently declared a National Monument. It's the only such barn in the world, I guess. And the place where much of the science that I'm going to tell you about took place, was this old Department of Biochemistry building, on Henry Mall. It was built in 1912. The cast of characters are these. And in fact, there are more. But these will suffice for our time together today. Armsby was the first chairman of this department, of what was called Agricultural Chemistry then. Then, Stephen Babcock joined the department and became the chairman in 1888. And he lived until 1931, though he retired well before that. And Hart, his successor as chairman, he was there from 1906, and acted as chairman from 1913 until 1945. He lived a long life in the saddle there in biochemistry. The others from this list, McCollum, Steenbock, Link and Elvehjem may be names that are familiar to you. Each of them has some kind of a building named for them on the campus. And each of them has made a really significant contribution to some aspect of nutrition or biochemistry. You may have noticed around campus the brass plaques that someone had the good insight to put out. They are placed in front of the building where a certain scientific discovery took place. This is the first one I want to point out to you. It commemorates the fact that the College of Agriculture, almost from the day of its inception, was a place where scientific research took place to try to help farmers to raise their crops and healthier animals. There was a Dean, Harry Russell, who was also a famous bacteriologist. And he made his reputation early here by discovering that there was a bad infection of tuberculosis among the cow herds of Wisconsin. And he showed how to recognize this, and cull the herds. He was succeeded by William Henry, who was the Dean during much of the time that I'm going to tell you about today. Babcock himself was born on a farm in New York state. He grew up there. He left the farm when he was 18 to go to college at Tufts in Boston. But his father died young, and he had to go back and run the family farm for ten years or so. But after that, as a middle aged man, went off to Gttingen, where he studied what was then called agricultural chemistry, in a very famous department, where he brushed shoulders with some people who had made 19th century chemistry famous in Europe. And his work at Gttingen and his work from then on had to do with figuring out using the tools of a chemist, what the value of foods was as nutrients, primarily for animals. But of course, it also follows that if it works for animals, it works for people. After some time at Gttingen, he returned to Cornell Ag Station for a brief period, then to New York Ag Station, this is in Geneva, a very famous Ag Station, where most of the agricultural chemists in the country were trained. And while there, he got involved weekly in analysis of milk, which of course, is a major product of many of the farms at the time, both in New York and Wisconsin. In 1888, he was called to Wisconsin. And this is about what he looked like at that time. He became the chairman, and essentially, the only member of the Department of Agricultural Chemistry. During this time, there was a real ferment in agriculture, and that was true in Wisconsin and other places, as well. Milk had stopped being simply a product that you kept on the farm with you to raise your own family, and it had become a commercial product. The size of dairy herds was increasing, with some automation of some of the features of husbandry. And one of the big economic problems that had come up as a result of this increase in milk as a commercial product was that it wasn't easy for a farmer or a dairy to figure out what milk was really worth. Not all milk was equally good. Some milk has a lot more cream than others, therefore more valuable in making butter. And so, the question came up, how do you evaluate milk, especially in terms of how much fat there is in it, how much cream, and how much protein, which is what's converted into cheese. The problem was that farmers didn't have any way to be monitored. They were tempted to either just skim off the cream, and keep it for themselves before they sold the milk, or water the milk to increase its volume and weight, and thus get more money for what was, of course, inferior milk. So Babcock, when he came here, was assigned the job by the Dean, of figuring out a way to evaluate the milk that was effective, easy and could be done on all levels, at the farm and at the dairy as well. Here's another plaque that commemorates what he did. Stephen Babcock, 1890, developed a test after considerable work, he worked in a laboratory for several years on this, which has been said to have made more farmers honest than the Bible, the Babcock butterfat test. That test was performed with a simple apparatus like this. This is a Babcock centrifuge. In a simple bottle like this. I don't know if you can see it. I might have more pictures. There's the apparatus. These bottles were filled with milk using a pipette that would take up just exactly the right amount of milk. You'd put that in here. Then, whether you're a schoolboy or an old guy, you'd take sulfuric acid, concentrated and quite bad stuff, pour a given amount in here. Let the acids digest the milk, and then place the Babcock bottle here, spin it, and this was simply a way of speeding the separation of the cream from the milk. Cream floated because it's lighter. And the vessel here is calibrated along the top, so we can read right off of that what the butterfat content of the milk was. And this was a huge improvement in the quality control on dairy farms. Here's a picture of one that was for sale for four dollars, one of those apparatuses. I bought this on eBay for $80, so it was a real good investment in 1900. There they are. I'm actually surprised when I read the instructions that go along with this, that nothing is said about the fact that the sulfuric acid involved here is pretty corrosive stuff. And I wouldn't want my child to be using it. But apparently, it wasn't considered too much more serious than other dangers on the farm. This is old Babcock, late in his life. And he's beside another machine that accomplishes the same thing, but with many samples. This is a picture from 1920, I think. This is that same instrument that still stands in the Department of Dairy Science. It's on the east vestibule of Babcock Hall. These multi-sample Babcock testers allowed one to not only determine the milk composition for all the milk collected by a dairy, but you could actually do this for each cow, and thus, figure out which of your cows are giving the good milk, that is, with the most cream. You could pick out your best cow, well, now you can. And this, therefore, not only made the dairy industry honest, but it also made it possible to breed cows for their high quality of milk. You could watch over time and see which cows performed especially well. This is getting a little ahead of my story, but Hart, whose name I'll soon flesh out for you, developed a similar test using the same apparatus, that was able to measure the amount of protein in milk. Now, between Babcock and Hart, they've covered the two important commercial aspects of

milk

fat and protein. But the thing that made Babcock famous was the experiment that I want to tell you about now, and spend most of our time on. Here's Babcock seated in front of an analytical balance. And that really is quite symbolic, because much of what he accomplished as a scientist was accomplished by examining, using the balance as his tool, the composition of feed, animal, plant, manure, so that he could compare various things as to their quality as foods, and the effects of their quality on animals. I have Babcock's balance in my office now. I watch it every day and think of what a remarkable man he was. To set the story here, in 1900, the current hypothesis, the paradigm for how to evaluate foods hadn't changed in at least a hundred years. By 1800, chemists had developed the tools for measuring things such as how much fat, how much protein, how much carbohydrate, how much inorganic material. And the big guns in agriculture, mainly Leibig, a German chemist, had decided that what matters in the feed is just three things. Is there enough protein? And protein which contains nitrogen is typically measured by just measuring the nitrogen. Is there enough fat? Is there enough carbohydrate to provide energy. And if so, then this is an adequate feedstock. So, all you had to do to evaluate a feed is measure its chemical composition. And any combination of foods gave the right amounts of protein, fat and carbohydrate should, according to this hypothesis, be a good feed. But farmers knew better. They had seen over the years that there were things that were better than others, but nobody had attempted to quantitate this. Here, by the way, are two of the heroes of European science, that had sort of decided what animals and people should eat, Leibig on the left, the world's most famous chemist, and Lyon Playfair on the right, a name that came from Gilbert and Sullivan. If you look at this guy and ask yourself, if he told you to eat your spinach, would you eat it? My answer is yes, very quickly I would. In any case, they had endorsed this notion that food could be evaluated by simply looking at its composition. Now, comes onto the scene, EB Hart. He was hired by Babcock to come and help Babcock carry out an experiment that Babcock had started, but in a very small way, and too small a way to get good results. The experiment was aimed at determining whether all kinds of food were equally good, or if some were better than others. Babcock doubted that they were all equal, because he had gone to his mentor at the Geneva Ag Station in New York with two analyses that he presented and asked what the mentor thought of them as foods. The mentor said they looked about equally good to him. And then, Babcock revealed that one of them was the analysis of the food the cattle had been eating, and the second was the analysis of the manure they were producing. So clearly, the simple chemical analysis wasn't covering everything. And he, therefore, set about to do an experiment that tested whether there were other things in food that were as important or more important than things already known about. He needed help. And the help came in the form of Hart and two others that I'll show you in a moment. Hart, like Babcock, was born on a farm and grew up on a farm with 13 sisters and brothers. He got his degree at Michigan. Then, like most scientists in that era, he went to Europe for his finishing training. He worked with a famous biochemist called Kossel, who actually won the Nobel Prize for his discovery of DNA many years ago. He went, like Babcock did, to the state Ag Station in Geneva in New York, where he studies cheese ripening and phosphorous in nutrition, two things that turned out to be crucial to his continued work here in Wisconsin, where he arrived in 1906 to take over Ag Chem. He retired many years later with a real record of accomplishment. But one of the remarkable things I'll tell you about is that he didn't take much credit for his accomplishments. In fact, he often didn't put his name on papers that he contributed significantly to. This was just another of his traits that he shared with Babcock. Here is one of the two young men who were hired at this time by Hart to help in the experiment that we're going to talk about here. One is McCollum, from a Kansas farm family. He got a degree from Kansas, and then from Yale. He came here in 1907, so just after Babcock. He left here after ten years on the faculty to go to Johns Hopkins, where he stayed for 50 years. And he became a world famous biochemist and agricultural chemist. So he certainly added luster to this group. And then, the fourth person, besides Hart, Babcock, McCollum, was Harry Steenbock, whose name is probably familiar to you because he became a major philanthropist in this area. Many of the buildings that we have here are named for him. He grew up in New Holstein, Wisconsin. He went here to the university for his bachelor's degree. He went to work for Hart as an assistant, which in those days, was sort of a low-grade tenure track position that would eventually lead to his being hired as a professor. He spent a year with Carl Neuberg in Germany, as was so common. He got his PhD in 1916 with Hart as his mentor. And Harry Steenbock's name will always be associated with his discovery related to Vitamin D. But as you'll see, he was involved in much broader studies that had impacts throughout the area of nutrition. During his life, he published 250 papers, which is quite a production. And he trained 48 graduate students, which is a remarkable production. So here's the experiment that Babcock was proposing, to ask whether there was something in food besides carbohydrates, fats and proteins that was essential to nutrition. He managed to get the Dean of the Ag School to give him 16 heifers, young cows. And he divided them into four groups. One of which was fed entirely on corn products. He made a mixture of the corn kernel itself, and the stalk and the leaves, that gave a certain amount of carbohydrate, fat and protein. The second group, the four cows, got all wheat, but exactly the same amount of protein, carbohydrate and fat. The third got all oats. And the fourth got one-third mixture of corn, wheat and oats. So according to the current paradigm for nutrition, all of these animals should have been equally well nourished, and the results should be that they all grow up at the same rate, their calves should be really healthy, and so on. So they followed the growth of the heifer herself, the milk production, the health of the calves over a period of two years, very carefully quantitating everything they could measure, from these 16 cows. And as I say, the paradigm said they should not have differed in the results. The results of the experiment were published in the most famous publication that has ever come out of Wisconsin, so called Bulletin 17. It's in this book I brought along for us here, the 28th annual report, 1907. I think that's the date. It was called "Physiological Effect on Growth and Reproduction of Rations Balanced from Restricted Sources." So this is the so-called single grain experiment, to ask if all grains had the same effectiveness in nourishing an animal. Here are some pictures from that famous paper. Here's the cow that was fed entirely on oats after several years. Here's the calf. Wholly on oats. The cow grew fairly normally. The calves were either dead on arrival or were very ill, very weak. Here is the mixture cow, of three different grains, mixed in equal amounts. The cow grew fairly well. The calves were not as healthy, and sometimes were born prematurely, and were sometimes actually sick. Here is the wheat cow, whose calves were born dead. And here's the corn cow, who was herself very healthy, and a very healthy calf, always, that was the result that they always obtained. And this, of course, was contradictory to the idea that every food source was equally good. So, this was the occasion for one of those amazing things that happens now and then in science, when for years and years scientists have been beating their heads against a problem, using a certain way to frame the problem, a certain paradigm, and then somebody says, wait a minute, this paradigm is wrong. If we just looked at it this way, we could make sense of it. And the paradigm shift that occurs is what makes science exciting. Suddenly, there's an outburst of new ideas and new experiments and new findings. So the old paradigm said if you chemically analyze food, you'll know what's good. The new paradigm said, you have to analyze it biologically, that is, you have to ask, does it help the cow to be better nourished, does it help the calf? You have to have some analysis that measures its biological effect. And this turned out to be a huge race all over the world. In Britain, there was a group of people who raced neck and neck with the people at Wisconsin. And at the Ag Station in New York, there was another group. But the idea was to give animals a basal diet that supplied their calories and their protein and their fat, but was not adequate as judged by the fact that the calves were not healthy, for example. And then, to that basal diet, you added things that you thought might have the good stuff, the stuff that was in corn, but not in oats, not in wheat. One of the things that they discovered very early on in this experiment was that if they added butter to a bad ration, everything was fine. There was something in butter that wasn't carbohydrates, fats or proteins, and really did help the health of the animal. So, it became possible to use this as the set up to fractionate butter, to see what was it in the butter that was so important in nutrition. And all kinds of efforts were made to fractionate butter and other good foods to see what the good items were. McCollum, the young man, realized early on that if they had to do this sort of thing with cows, it was going to take forever. It was going to be very expensive, because it cost money to house and feed them. Their life cycle is long, so it would be a very lengthy experiment. And because the cost was such, you always had to work with small numbers of animals. You could never do an experiment where statistically, you had enough samples to really trust. So he said, let's go to work on some smaller animal, the white rat is what he chose, that had all these properties. There's a story in one of his papers. Actually, I guess it's in his autobiography. It says he went to the Dean of the Ag School to propose this, and the Dean threw him out of his office, saying that if the farmers of the state ever got wind of the fact that we were spending their money to learn how to nourish rats, they'd run us out of town on a rail. So, he went back to his mentor, Babcock, and Babcock and McCollum together schemed to go to Chicago, to a pet store, and buy a couple of sets of mating domesticated rats. And they became, in fact, the parents of all of the experimental rats used all over the world for a long time. Madison had the two largest rat farms in the world, on the near west side, which is now a high-rent district. So, the experiments that went on from now on could involve more animals and could be done in such a way that you really could get straight answers. ( inaudible ) Yes, it's called Harlan Heights. It used to be Harlan Sprague Dawley Rats. So, the rest, I say was history. There was a new paradigm. There was a way to do biological assays to see if something was good or not as a nutrient. And what you did after that, was you tried to figure out ways to separate the components of good food into separable fractions, and see which fraction contained the good stuff. McCollum very quickly discovered that you could fractionate butter into so-called fat-soluble stuff, which is soluble in organic solvents, and the water-soluble stuff. And he called the fat-soluble Vitamin A, and the water-soluble Vitamin B. Vitamin B turned out to be a mixture of a number of vitamins. Vitamin A turned out to be a mixture of five vitamins. McCollum then chose to study one of those, one we now call Vitamin A, whereas others in the department, Steenbock, Elvehjem, Hart and others later, studied the other vitamins, many of them water-soluble. Hart also realized that there was stuff in food that survived the roughest kind of chemical treatment, that is, if you converted the food into entirely ash, so there were no organic compounds left, it was still valuable as a nutrient. So there was something in there, which of course, we now recognize to be minerals, like phosphate, sodium, chloride, and so on. So eventually, McCollum purified and characterized the Vitamin A. Steenbock discovered a way to produce Vitamin D very inexpensively, as I'll show you shortly. Elvehjem and Strong discovered the compound niacin to be a water-soluble vitamin, that entirely cured the terrible disease, terrible then in prisons and orphanages especially, of pellagra. It cured it in a shot, like that. Snell, another faculty member who is not on the original list, because he came along later, worked on Vitamin B-6. These people, together, looked at vitamins C, K, and E. And Elvehjem, Steenbock, Hart, Hoekstra, looked at minerals copper, iron, zinc, iodine, and so on. So there was a tremendous explosion of interest in these components, and slowly, it became clear that the inadequate diet that had been discovered with this experiment with the cows, was inadequate in several ways. It wasn't just lacking one thing, it was lacking a number of things. And when they finally added it up, it was quite a list. So here are just a few of the plaques that commemorate these findings. Hart set the stage. I should say, by the way, that Babcock planned the experiment, and had the whole idea in his mind. But he never put his name on it. The paper didn't have his name on it. Hart organized the workers and made this happen, so he surely deserved equal credit for this. But this says that the original experiment pointed out the likely existence of vitamins and trace minerals. McCollum discovered Vitamins A and what he called water-soluble B. There were others around the world, who at the same time, were doing the same thing, so there was a race. Steenbock discovered that the Vitamin D, which was one of the fat-soluble vitamins, was curative for the very serious disease rickets, serious especially in the northern climates, including places like northern Wisconsin, where people wear clothes most of the year. It turns out that you need sunlight to fall on your skin to make Vitamin D. And if you don't have that, then you've got to get it someplace else. Steenbock discovered a very easy way to get at Vitamin D. He discovered, if you irradiated food with an ultraviolet lamp, it produced Vitamin D in the product. And it worked out to be very effective in irradiated milk. So, Steenbock was able to develop a method that solved completely the very serious problem of rickets, by simply irradiating milk, or adding irradiated foods to milk to cure that disease. There was a disease in pigs, in which the pigs were born hairless and had something called "the thumps," a behavioral problem. And it turned out that they were anemic. Their red blood cell count was low, and they were sick because of that. Then a thorough investigation of that by the Wisconsin group, including Elvehjem, and Hart, and Steenbock, showed that the problem was that these pigs needed to have both iron and copper provided in their diet. If they didn't have enough, then they would be sick. And it turned out that this was also true of humans, for the same reasons, and that this resulted in the cure of several kinds of human anemias, as well. There was, at the time, at the turn of the 20th century, a serious problem in the whole central part of the United States called goiter. It was an enlargement of the gland, the thyroid gland. It's normally this size and sits alongside the trachea. In patients with goiter, this gland enlarges, and sometimes it enlarges quite a bit. And it turns out that the only problem responsible for this grotesque situation is that these people didn't get enough iodine in their diets. If you put just a whiff of iodine in their diet, that completely cures the disease goiter. And as you probably have noticed, from early times, early in the 20th century, until the present, the way that iodine was delivered to patients, to people in general, was to put just a little bit of iodine into the table salt that we all use. And that was sufficient to completely cure the disease goiter. Here are Conrad Elvehjem and Frank Strong. Strong was still here when I came in '71, so I got to know him. Elvehjem was gone by that time. But Elvehjem was the teacher and Strong was the student. They worked together on this disease, pellagra, which as it turned out was a nutritional disease that occurred mostly in people who lived in orphanages or prisons, and who therefore didn't get a very varied or very good diet. It turned out there was something missing in their diet. That something was identified by Elvehjem and Strong as the vitamin niacin. And instantly, the disease was cured. Niacin was cheap and easy to make by the ton. And it was therefore, after this time, no excuse for anybody anywhere to ever suffer again from pellagra. Well, that's interesting. I was going to show you a picture, but Quicktime needs a decompressor. The picture I wanted to show you is one that I hope some of you will see sometime. In the old Biochemistry building, there's a mural by John Steuart Curry, who was the artist in residence in Madison for a period, 1940-44. He painted a mural called "The Social Benefits of Biochemical Research," in which he showed from left to right, ill animals, and ill children, and ill people, and on the right, healthy ones. And this was his way of representing the social benefits of research. When we now look at a bottle of vitamins, what we see is all these things, Vitamin A, Vitamin C, D-3, E. And as I looked at this last night, I realized there's hardly a vitamin on this, or a mineral down here, that wasn't worked on at Madison. Almost all of these had their early history in Madison. So, we have now, simply, you can take a pill to essentially make sure that you won't suffer from any of the deficiencies that used to be very common in poor diet times. Now, I wanted to give you some feeling for just how famous and how well regarded Babcock was during this time. So I'll read to you here from McCollum. McCollum was the student who worked with Babcock. In McCollum's own autobiography, he was talking about how in Babcock's later life, he'd become sort of a senior scientist and a diplomat for the university. "In time, I learned that he was the most important man in Wisconsin as far as the entire University was concerned. He had taught agricultural chemistry to farm boys for 35 years. He was recognized by his students as a superior man who was not only well informed and a capable teacher, but an original thinker. He had invented a simple and accurate mechanical test for determining the fat content..." This also, by the way, reads that he, in the student-teacher relationship, had set up the Farm Short Course, which became a feature of Wisconsin's Ag School, and has remained so since. Babcock was so famous, he even got a hollyhock named after him. This is him in his old age. He lived in a house on Lake Street. And I think it was the house that used to be across from McDonald's on Lake Street, that housed Student Services. If you wanted to rent a place in Madison, you could go there and look. In any case, that's Babcock in his old age. He even was the object of an article that gave him credit for being a human being, which scientists are not used to. Now, here's Harry Steenbock. I want to, in the next few minutes, show you what the sequel to all this was. Steenbock went on to study Vitamin D. When Babcock had developed the Babcock test, which was of great commercial value, he decided he wouldn't patent it. And he was criticized for this, because it certainly would've been a very lucrative patent, and might have brought money in that could've been used for science. But he insisted that this was for the public, and didn't want the money. When Steenbock discovered that you could irradiate milk and thereby produce a good Vitamin D source, he immediately was approached by food companies who wanted to buy the rights to use this in their foods. And he declined to sell it to them, but instead got together a group of a few Wisconsin Alumni, each of whom kicked in a few dollars to hire a lawyer. And they set up a foundation, which became the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, WARF. And that foundation at first helped to get the patents on the process of Vitamin D formation by irradiation, and then handled the proceeds, the money that came in from this very lucrative patent. The terms of the original foundation said that the money earned this way had to all be spent in research at the university. So for all these years, since Steenbock first established WARF, the university has profited enormously from very large amounts of money that flowed in, from his patents first, and for many other patents since. He, himself, who lived frugally and became a rich man. And he, when he died, endowed the Wisconsin Academy. He endowed several libraries, including the life sciences library on the campus, the Steenbock Library. He provided money to a few things like the Steenbock Symposium, which this summer was a symposium in honor of Gobind Khorana, one of our local Nobel Prize winners. But he gave money for the Steenbock Lectures. His a picture of Paul Boyer, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin that went on to win the Nobel Prize. We have a lecture in his name every year. And perhaps his best gift to the university was Hector DeLuca, one of his last students, who has continued Steenbock's work until the present, and has produced over the years, a number of compounds that are used medicinally, the treatment of diseases that affect bone metabolism, calcium and phosphate metabolism. So he had a huge impact on the university. Elvehjem became the Chairman of the Biochemistry Department. He then became Dean of the Graduate School, and eventually the President of the University of Wisconsin, and he died in that office. The Elvehjem Museum, of course, was named for him. He trained a prodigious 88 PhDs. I can't imagine how one man could do this. But those PhDs included some very prominent people. Van Potter went on to be a very famous and important member of the faculty at Wisconsin. Harry Waisman, whose name is attached to the Waisman Center, the center for research and treatment of children with developmental disorders. Milt Sunde was the chairman of a department on campus. Alf Harper was a chairman of the Nutrition Department. So Elvehjem produced not only an enormous amount of work on the B vitamins, but also peopled the country with students who went on to carry out his work. McCollum didn't stay at Madison very long. He was here from 1907-1917. But when he left here, he went to an interesting position. Everything I've told you so far has been about agriculture, and I told you the department here was originally called Agricultural Chemistry. It became Biochemistry in Elvehjem's time. But when McCollum went to Johns Hopkins from here, he didn't go to an ag school, he went to a medical school. This was sort of a remarkable change, which meant that now the information that he had been developing with studies of animals about what was important in nutrition, came to be applied to humans. And McCollum went on to do wonderful work, write several important textbooks on nutrition, found an institute called the McCollum Pratt Institute there. He came to be called Dr. Vitamin. And he actually was a tremendous asset to the Johns Hopkins Medical School, and was one of the people who made it famous in that period. There was, during this period, 1909 or 1910 to 1930, an author, Paul deKruif. Do any of you know about him, about anything he's written? He wrote sort of breathless prose about science. And one of his books was called "The Hunger Fighters," and it largely featured Babcock and Hart. Here's a little quotation to give you an idea of the kind of writer he was. "There is a kind of hunger other than the hunger of the face gaunt for lack of food, of the lean belly hurting for want of something to fill it. There is the hidden hunger that lets folks starve to death while they are eating plenty. Babcock of Wisconsin was the first of all modern men to find this hunger that doesn't gnaw at man and beast, but only strikes them down..." And he goes on, and you can get a feeling for the kind of prose he uses. But he carried on extensive correspondence with Hart in the writing of this book. And that correspondence still exists. I spent some days going through it a few days ago. And it was remarkable to me, that in all of his correspondence with deKruif, Hart invariably played down his role, and said it was really nothing, it was the young guys who did it. But looking at the experiments themselves, it's very clear that Hart was the brains and the driving force behind them. So we have that remarkable case of a modest professor. Now, some of you may have heard the talk or seen the newspaper accounts of Michael Pollan who was here just a few days ago to give a lecture. His book, "In Defense of Food," has been chosen by the university as one of those that everybody will read, so we can all talk about it in common. And he's a very serious critic of much of what I've been telling you about today. The criticism is less direct than you might suppose by the words here. But his idea is that for as long as you are doctoring up food to put back nutrients into it, you're turning it into something that isn't really food, and we'd all be better off if we went back to real food that hadn't been doctored. He calls the rise of nutritionism a bad development. And I thought it would have been really very interesting to have Michael Pollan on one side of the stage and EB Hart on the other to talk about this, because they had both invested a lot in these ideas. And I think they would've probably reached the same conclusion, after a long conversation, which is that the work that went on here and elsewhere to discover the vitamins was absolutely essential. The paradigm that was followed, that is, feeding an animal the bare minimum diet and then supplementing it to see what works, was the only way a scientist could do a biological assay. And the motive for these studies here in the early 1900s was to give agriculture a firmer financial basis. So the idea was to figure out, what's the least expensive food I can serve my animals and still get good quality meat and milk from them. Whereas, of course, in the evaluation of a human diet, there are other factors, which to Michael Pollan, are very important factors. And they don't necessarily have a financial bottom line. There are other reasons why we eat, than to make milk and wheat. So, with that, I'll close and invite any questions you may have about any of this. And if you wish, I'd be happy to supply you with a set of references that account for much of what I've told you today.