cc >> Tom Zinnen: Welcome,
everyone, to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.
I'm Tom Zinnen. I work at the Biotechnology
Center at UW-Madison. I also work for UW Extension
Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those folks and our
other sponsors, Wisconsin Public Television and the Wisconsin
Alumni Association, thanks for coming to Wednesday Nite at the
Lab. We do this every Wednesday,
50 times a year. We don't do this every Wednesday
night, however, because this is leap day.
We won't have another leap day on Wednesday until 2040.
[LAUGHTER] Whew, I hope to be here.
[LAUGHTER] Keeping with such a fitting
date, I get to introduce to you two splendid people who
are going to talk to you about the John Steuart Curry murals
tonight. Dave Nelson is professor of
biochemistry here at UW Madison where he has served for
40 years. His interests include the
history of science, and he's currently one of a group of
senior UW professors teaching a course on historic research
breakthroughs here at Wisconsin. His bachelor's is in chemistry
and biology from St. Olaf's. His PhD is from the Stanford
Medical School and is in biochemistry.
Before coming to Madison, Dave spent two years as a fellow at
the Harvard Medical School. His research interest is in the
biochemistry of biological signaling in microorganisms.
Nobody has given more Wednesday Nite at the Labs than Dave
Nelson, and nobody does it better.
[LAUGHTER] Lauren Kroiz is an assistant
professor in the Department of Art History here
at UW-Madison. She received her PhD from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Before moving to Madison in 2010 she was a visiting professor at
Bowdoin College and a postdoctoral fellow at the
Phillips Collection Center for the Study of Modern Art in
Washington, DC. Her first book manuscript,
entitled Creative Composites: Race, Modernism, and the
Stieglitz Circle, was awarded the 2010 Phillips Book Prize
and will be published by the University of California Press
in the fall of 2012. She told me how to pronounce it.
I mispronounced it. It's Bowdoin.
It's okay. I'm not there anymore.
I'm here. [LAUGHTER]
Please join me in welcoming Lauren to Wednesday
Nite at the Lab. [APPLAUSE]
Lauren Kroiz: Thanks, Tom. So I want to thank Tom for
inviting me to speak, and also Robin Davies who will take many
of the pictures that you will see in my talk today.
And I also want to thank Dave Nelson from biochemistry.
They've all been extremely welcoming to me even though it's
been quite some time since I've been in a lab.
So I'm excited to be here today. I also, of course, want to thank
everyone who worked so hard to save these murals before I
arrived on campus. So, I'm in the middle of my
second here at UW, and I'm an art historian.
And we tend to write out our talks, so I'm just going to try
and talk from notes today and we'll see how it goes.
I've been working on the project I'm going to talk about today,
which I think is a fascinating history of John Steuart Curry's
time at Wisconsin. I've been working on this
project for about six months, and for me it's part of a larger
story about Midwest regionalism, arts education, and citizenship
in the 1930s and '40s in what we think of as the Roosevelt
New Deal era. So I feature my email up here
quite prominently and I have lots of cards in my pocket
because I know a lot of you have been here far longer than me and
have a lot of information about the projects I'm going to talk
about today that I haven't been able to dig out of the archives.
So I really welcome your knowledge here.
So today I'm going to focus on the story of how John Steuart
Curry came to be at the University of Wisconsin and also
what he did here. Then I'll talk briefly about the
newly restored murals, which, to my mind, are really unique
examples of the way working on campus influenced John Steuart
Curry. And then I'll turn it over to
professor Dave Nelson who will tell us more.
So, to begin, I only have time for a crash course in art
history today, so I just wanted to point out that John Steuart
Curry is one of a trio of famous regionalist painters.
Here you see him. I've been told to try to use
this track pad. So here you see him with Thomas
Hart Benton, who's the other one, and Grant Wood.
And you can see them, again, to your right making music.
So in the 1930s these three artists became well known for
their regionalist, or it's also known as American scene style
painting. Although their work looks quite
different, you won't, for example, confuse the murals that
you'll see tonight with Grant Wood's most famous painting,
American Gothic. We can say that they share
realist style, which celebrates subjects from the nation's
agricultural heartland, so from the Midwest.
And you can see here that in addition to be artistic allies,
these three were really good friends.
In the mid-1930s they begin to become increasingly famous.
Benton is on the cover of Time magazine, and there are large
spreads devoted to Curry's artwork also in Life.
So, in addition to making art, each of these painters was also
interested in teaching artwork. Curry and Benton teach at The
Art Students League in New York during the 1920s and early '30s,
while Wood co-founds an art colony in Stone City, Iowa, in
1932. So here I show you some pictures
of that. Curry comes, as you can see on
the right, he comes and visits Wood there and apparently has a
quite good time. Unfortunately, Wood taught for
free at Stone City, and even with that the school lost money,
so it folded in 1933. It's kind of a truism that
there's not that much money in teaching art.
But by 1934 Wood was able to capitalize on his fame and his
mural commissions to land a teaching job at the University
of Iowa. And Iowa is the state where Wood
is born. So he comes to teach at his
state university. And in 1935, Benton is also able
to capitalize on his fame, and he gets invited to teach at the
Kansas City Art Institute in Missouri, the state where he was
born. So for Wood, it seems to have
been sort of an embarrassment that Curry wouldn't join them in
the Midwest. He was still living on the east
coast in West Port, Connecticut, rather than in the Midwest that
the regionalists claim to represent.
So Wood began to look around for a place for Curry, for a place
that he could work. It's nice to have good friends.
But they decided that there's no way that Curry was going to get
hired at the University of Kansas, which was the state
where Curry was born. People in the art department
there apparently really didn't like him, and the citizens of
Kansas were slightly offended by the fact that Curry always
painted them being afflicted by cyclones.
His most famous paintings were of tornadoes.
[LAUGHTER] So Wood didn't give up though.
And eventually he succeeded in getting Curry to the Midwest.
And he gets him hired as an artist in residence at the
University of Wisconsin in our College of Agriculture.
So here you can just see some images of Curry mugging in front
of the Madison landscape. And this is a painting entitled
Madison Landscape from 1941, which some of you may have seen.
It's still around Madison. I'll not now that in my
presentation you might see a bit of overprinting.
You might see it in the photograph on the far left here.
And that's just a security marker from the Archives of
American Art where I've downloaded a lot of these
images, and I just say that because you, too, can go to the
Archives of American Art online and download a lot of these
images if you want Curry, for example, as the background for
you computer. So, to give you a sense of why
Wisconsin would have been a welcoming place for Curry, and
just as a little plug for my art history department, I know we
don't get over to Wednesday Nite at the Lab that often, I'm going
to give you a brief sense of what's going on here in the late
1930s when Curry's looking for a place to land.
So our art history department was founded by Oscar Hagen in
1925, and on the left, of course, you see a portrait of
Dr. Oscar Hagen and his cat by John Steuart Curry in 1942.
And he was, apparently, a very red-faced man, but this portrait
was controversial even when it was painted for being slightly
unflattering. But Hagen is an immigrant from
Germany, and he was quite eager to understand American art.
The first graduate alumni of the art history department here is
Porter Butts who some of you probably know both for his
important book, this 1936 account of Wisconsin art, as
well as the gallery that's named for him here on campus.
So Hagen and Curry quickly became friends, and Hagen
actually inscribes a copy of his Birth of the American Tradition
in Art, which is one of the first accounts of American art,
to Curry. And here you can see it says,
"To John Steuart Curry, first of the Americans, in friendship and
admiration." So he has allies in the art
history department, Hagen and Butts, in addition to James
Watrous, who would go on to be a really important member of the
art history department. Here you see him painting his
Paul Bunyan murals in 1936. These are murals that Curry
evidently admired when he arrived on campus, and they are
too still extant, of course, in the Union.
Watrous was also really interested in advancing
experimental methods for teaching art history in what he
called the art history laboratory.
So students there studied old master drawing by mimicking old
master methods, including the creation of materials.
So I tell you this just to give you a sense of the kind of
experimental worth that's going on on this campus as Curry's
arriving. But, of course, more important
than these art historians to Curry's arrival on campus was
the dean of the agriculture school, Chris Christensen, who
you see here in both a photograph and Curry's painted
portrait. So plans for Curry to move to
Wisconsin really began in earnest in the summer of 1936
when Wood approached Glen Frank, who was president of the
university, and Dean Christensen to ask if they would hire Curry.
Both of them were extremely enthusiastic about Curry joining
the university, especially Christensen.
It seems that Christensen may have already known Wood through
the National Country Life Association which they were both
active in. This was an organization that
was trying to idolize rural life around America.
So Christensen had actually been looking for a way to interest
farmers in art. Christensen had been trained at
an agriculture school in Denmark where one period source
explained that he had experienced the "wide spread and
consuming pleasure that Danish tillers of the soil derive from
paintings." So he thought that American
farmers could also share this consuming pleasure if art would
just approach them with subjects that they as farmers could
understand. And this is the project that
he's trying to advance when he brings Curry to campus.
So Curry moves from West Port, Connecticut, on Long Island
Sound, to fill this new novel position at the university.
There's really no precedent in this period for an artist
in residence. One newspaper described Curry
as undertaking a "do as I please job."
[LAUGHTER] So it seemed to be that he could
just sort of do whatever he wanted.
His contract stipulated only that he would work as an artist
in residence "for development of regional as a force for rural
culture." And it seems that Oscar Hagen
was the one who initially offered the model of the artist
in residence, and he was drawing on something that was happening
in the period. They were beginning to have
academic writers in residence, so he advances this idea of an
artist in residence as something that would be better than having
Curry actually officially join the faculty.
So he's not here as part of the art department or part of the
art history department, but rather the artist in residence
in the agriculture college. So his position, Curry's
position, was officially authorized in September of 1936,
and the artist accepts just days later.
He seems to be really on board. His salary isn't funded by the
university but is, rather, funded by the Wisconsin Trust
Fund of the Brittingham Estate. And the university secured a
$400,000 grant from the State Emergency Fund to build him a
studio. So he gets a studio, he gets
$4,000 a year, and he holds this position for a decade, from 1936
until his death in 1946. So, what people called Curry's
elastic plans for what he was going to do with his time
included murals and also paintings of agriculture topics.
And he was charged particularly to focus on soil erosion which
was a pet subject of Dean Christensen's.
And here you see a painting called Erosion and Contour
Cropping from circa, around, 1936-1940.
And this in the Chazen Art Museum's collection.
So Curry was quick to clarify that he wasn't going to paint
propaganda, but he said instead that he would "cull the drama,
destruction, and spirit from the subject and represent it
pictorially in his own style." So he's really careful to say
that what he's doing is not propaganda for any particular
kind of agriculture or any particular way of living, but,
rather, and attempt to cull the drama from rural life.
So as an artist in residence, Curry didn't teach classed but
he did plan to attend art appreciation classes for
informal discussions. And he was also supposed to give
instruction and encouragement to those who wanted to paint.
So he was hired, of course, though, by the College of
Agriculture, and he had an appointment in rural sociology.
So here I show you another interaction with Christensen.
Here it's actually Dean Christensen here who's holding
the reigns to this horse, a Belgian stallion named
Badger --, which the title is given the part of the article
that's above. So this is the kind of thing
that Curry did around campus as artist in residence for the ag
school. His most important charge was
"to establish and develop a feeling for art among the
agricultural students by discussing with them
agricultural as well as art problems."
He wants to eliminate the inhibitions which non-urban
residents look upon painting. So the idea was that agriculture
students were scared of painting, that they were
inhibited from enjoying this thing that could bring such
pleasure to their lives. So by having this very manly
interaction, you can see he's dressed in a suit, he's got his
pipe, and he's painting this horse which they all understood,
it was thought that with the support of the dean that he
would be able to spread this love of art to the agriculture
students. This is such a weird idea, like
why should farmers know how to paint or be interested in
painting? But really for Christensen and
for Curry there was a sense in which teaching these farmers
about art would make them better citizens.
So you can see, he does this kind of thing all over campus.
So he's teaching, here you can see he's instructing a group of
students doing preliminary drawings of a horse.
In the photograph on the left he's out in a field sketching
sheep. So he's spreading this idea that
even farmers should appreciate art, something that's difficult
for American audiences to embrace in the same way that
those at the Danish folk school had.
He's doing that by being present on campus and working among
these students. He also goes to football games.
Here you can see the text reads that Curry was appointed an
artist in residence, and this photograph shows him being upset
by members of the university's football team as he was
sketching them during a scrimmage.
[LAUGHTER] Apparently, through the spring
and fall of 1937 the artist would appear regularly on
the sidelines during practice.
And this kind of thing was actually part of Curry's
regionalism. He told audiences that he would
like to reach the extent where sections of the country, he
said, would take the same pride in their local painters as they
do in their ball teams. So really trying to put art on
the same level as sports, especially impressive task at
Wisconsin, I will say. [LAUGHTER]
Football. Okay, so these paintings that he
made of football do exist. This is him standing next to the
All-American. This is a photograph from circa
1945. and this is a painting that was
actually originally painted for reproduction.
So it was originally painted for Abbott Laboratories to be
reproduced in this magazine that they put out.
And then Curry suggested that they donate the original
painting to the athletic department.
And it's somewhere in Camp Randall.
I'm not sure exactly where. If anybody knows, you can tell
me later. So still existing,
the All-American. Okay, so in his art practice,
Curry was supposed to act as a kind of living museum.
This is part of his charge, to be a living museum.
And on the left, you see him in his studio here on campus.
So he was supposed to enable Wisconsinites to witness an
artist in the midst of creation. And in some ways I think this
was probably the most important part of his decade here as an
artist in residence. He gave a lot of people their
first chance to interact with, to be encouraged by, and to also
see their lives reflected by an artist.
So some art historians have critiqued the work that he did
on campus. Here I show you his activities
on the right of a drawing of a group of students on Bascom
Hill. So some students have critiqued
this kind of work as illustration, and they say that
it's not as good as the kind of powerful work that Curry did
when he was still looking to Kansas work, like probably one
of his most famous paintings Baptism in Kansas from 1928.
So they say that Curry's most powerful work was actually
behind him by the time that he reached Wisconsin.
Now, I'm interested, instead, in the way that his project here
actually calls for thinking about art in a new context, that
there are ways to think about Curry beyond his paintings.
So what I'm interested in is the paintings but also the ways that
he's trying to think about the importance of art during the
Depression. So to understand Curry's role at
Wisconsin, my claim is that it necessitates looking outside the
history of art, looking instead to rural sociology.
And this is the group with whom he worked on a rural arts
program that had him accompany sociologists throughout the
state in search of amateur artists.
And Curry's strongest ally at Wisconsin was actually in rural
sociology. It's John Rector Barton, who you
see here with Curry. And then here's Curry.
And they're at a rural art show. So Barton was the director of
Wisconsin's Farm Short Course, and he was also a professor in
the Department of Rural Sociology.
So Christensen, Dean Christensen, had also hired
Barton, and he brought Barton back from Denmark where he had
been the director of the International Peoples College.
And Barton arrives on campus from Denmark, which has this
strong tradition of the rural folk school, he arrives at the
same time that Curry does in 1936.
So they become close friends and really close allies.
Here you can see a flier for their rural art show, which I
think these cows are adorable. So you can see this flier for
this event which was started in 1940.
And to mount this event, Curry and others sociologists traveled
throughout the Wisconsin countryside recruiting artists,
and they were aided by county extension agents.
So the same people who you wee supposed to talk to about your
farm problems you could also talk to about your art problems.
[LAUGHTER] It's totally fascinating,
I think. So Curry shared Christensen and
Barton's beliefs about the power of art to create a more vital
world for rural people. He spread these beliefs in local
radio interviews. You see one in the upper left.
I don't know who the guy is with him.
So if anybody knows, I would love to know.
So he's interviewed during shows like The Homemaker's Hour, and
he argues that along with improved farming methods should
go the joy of having good pictures to look at, good music
to hear, and good books to read. The thought is that country
families as well as city families should have the
advantages of culture that are found in art galleries, concert
halls, and libraries. So this is kind of a radical
claim. His claim is that art should be
viewed as a practical thing, that everybody should have art.
And he encouraged people to hang paintings of their communities
in their homes, in their schools, in their libraries
rather than prints of famous buildings or prints of famous
paintings. So he wanted people to have
original artwork that represented their own place.
He believed, he said, that "if a community which has raised a
well-bred and excellent herd of cattle or a prize-winning horse
or developed an unusual food product could have these
celebrated and good paintings on the walls of community
buildings, we will be a better nation."
So there this idea that if you have a good horse, you should
have a painting of it on the wall, which is kind of quite a
radical claim. And with Curry's collaboration,
the Department of Agriculture also introduced arts practice
into agricultural instruction. So there a period that if you
went to the short course, the farm winter short course, you
would also learn how to paint in addition to learning how to
fertilize. [LAUGHTER]
In addition to spread this and encourage this even farther,
they started that rural art exhibition that I was
talking about. And this ran as part of farm and
home week at Madison. And that's what I like to image
that he's inventorying on the right with the sort of
conflicted expression, we'll just say, scratching his head.
So these exhibitions, these rural art exhibitions, collected
the work of amateur rural artists for display in Madison.
And these exhibits were extremely popular and incredibly
successful. They attracted national
attention. This is a page from Life
magazine which prominently featured my personal favorite
artist and also the artist that Curry called the most versatile,
Earl Sugden, who's a farmer who enjoys painting country
landscapes with brushes that he makes from the tails of his own
horses. So this is, again, sort of
trying to figure out how to be a farmer artist.
He also creates sand painting landscapes, which you might be
able to see up here, and all the different species of birds in
Wisconsin. And, of course, he's playing
this shepherd's pipe, which he carved himself from a butternut
tree. On the left is one of Sugden's
paintings and, on the right, a painting by Lord --, just to
give you a sense of what the work that these kinds
of rural artists was creating looked like.
It inspired one enthusiastic viewer, the enthusiastic viewer
from Life magazine, to proclaim "when art can hold its own with
prize cows, it is in a healthy state."
So this equation of aesthetic expression with livestock, I
think in some ways smacks of a sort of philistinism.
But I think that we can really take these words seriously to
frame productive news ways in which we might understand art's
relationship with healthy states.
Curry dies somewhat unexpectedly in 1946, but Barton continues
their project, producing this book, Rural Artists of
Wisconsin, in 1948. The artists were chosen by
Curry, and it prominently features Sugden's sand
paintings. So we can talk in more detail
about the murals when we get to them.
But here I just want to point out some of the similarities
with the work that I've showed you up until now.
So you can see this is the farm and biochemistry in the south
wall of the conference room, and it's meant to show the values
that biochemistry can have on the farm.
Here you see that same kind of contoured plowing, contour
cropping, that you see in this earlier painting.
I would say that in some ways in this mural Curry's depiction of
this is much more resolved. It creates a kind of picturesque
landscape. He's much more successful at
making these new weird methods of contour plowing picturesque,
integrating them into the landscape.
And that's really what I want to claim is part of the power of
these murals, their ability to make these scientific
breakthroughs seem natural. So here, in this bad photo that
I took myself, you can see Babcock, or someone, showing us
how vitamin D is synthesized, and then that's right next to a
Native American woman cooking meat over a fire.
So showing that the scientific is linked to this much longer
tradition. Let's skip that because I'm
running out of time. Okay.
So finally, in the large panel in the hallway, you can see the
way that this is a family who's suffering.
The little boy, on the left, the little boy has rickets, the girl
has pellagra. So it's certainly about the
power. These murals are certainly about
the power of agricultural chemistry to help rural people.
But I want to claim that it's also about the power of art to
cultivate engaged citizens. So it's also about the way that
prized cows and prized artwork shouldn't be considered all that
different. So I'll just conclude by
thanking the conservators and all you guys who helped preserve
these murals and who couldn't be here, as well as the archivists
and librarians who have helped me.
So thank you. [APPLAUSE]
Next up, Dave Nelson.
Dave Nelson: Thank you, Lauren.
I think I learned more about Curry's paintings in a half hour
than I've learned by living next to them for 30 years.
Let me just have a second here to switch gears.
Switching gears isn't as easy as it used to be.
[LAUGHTER]
There we go. As you walked in tonight, if you
came in the front door of this building, you walked passed this
bronze plaque commemorating the work of Stephen Babcock who was
one of the first and most prominent members of the
department of what was then called agricultural chemistry,
which has since been called biochemistry.
And I've walked by that myself a thousand times now, I suppose,
in 40 years. I've had students walk by it 40
times a semester to come hear my lectures, and many of them, at
the end of 40 lectures, still can't tell you what Stephen
Babcock did to get his plaque on the wall there.
They think perhaps he invented ice cream.
But it was nothing nearly so simple as that.
There was a group of scientists here that worked, essentially,
under his guidance in the early period right at the turn of the
20th century who did experiments aimed at aiding agriculture.
So the college was trying very hard to do things, a real
practical import, and he did so in ways that were fundamentally
good science. So we have a combination of
those things. The college at that time, this
is 1915, was pretty sparsely populated, both with people and
with buildings. There were fields and sheep
grazing where there are now tall buildings.
This was, and is, the dairy barn, which is down, as you go
along Campus Drive, you drive right by it there.
This is the site of the experiments that I'm going to
tell you about that were conducted by Hart, Steenbock,
McCollum, Elvehjem, but essentially planned by and
inspired by Stephen Babcock. The work that I'm describing
actually began before this building was built.
This was constructed in 1913. The department came into
existence long before that. And for a while the small
number, two or three members, of the department, agricultural
chemistry, were housed in South Hall.
And then there was a time when they were housed in Ag Hall.
And, finally, they came to this place in 1912 or 1913.
The characters that I want to tell you about here include
these on the list and one more, which I decided to talk about a
few minutes before I came here. They were Armsby, who was the
first of the people who was hired to start an agricultural
chemistry department here. He stayed rather briefly but got
the place started. Babcock was hired to bring it to
fruition, and he certainly did so.
He came here in 1888. I'll tell you a bit more about
his career in a few moments. But Babcock must have been a
great chooser of people because he quickly accumulated a group
around him that included Hart and McCollum and Steenbock and,
eventually, Elvehjem, a very powerful group of people who did
very important science. He was aided in this by working
with the dean, Harry Russell, who took seriously the college's
responsibility to farmers, but also their responsibility to do
good, solid, well-documented science.
Russell, himself, had been a very well-respected scientist,
and when he came here as the dean of the college, one of the
first things he told his small faculty was do it right, do good
fundamental research, and it will have a fallout that goes
into practical things in agriculture.
So let's just take, quickly, a look at these three or four
people that constituted the nucleus of agricultural chemists
then. Babcock was born in New York
state on a sheep farm. Everybody was born on a farm
then. He went to school at Tufts.
He had planned to go to graduate school but his father died
young, and so Babcock actually ran the family farm for almost
10 years. Eventually he went to Europe,
studied in Gottingen, and at that time, in Gottingen as well
as in the United States, the real goal of agricultural
chemistry was to use chemistry to figure out what it took to
make animals, and to some extent people, healthy.
And I want to tell you about the way that the thinking about what
it took progressed and, as a result of Stephen Babcock's
work, changed dramatically. So Babcock spent some time at
the Agricultural Experiment Station at Cornell.
He was briefly at the New York Agricultural Experiment Station
where he began the work that became his life's work on dairy
products. And then he came here in 1888
as, essentially, the Department of Agricultural Chemistry.
Babcock did two things that would have each made him world
famous. The first, I'm not proposing to
talk about tonight except really to tell you that Babcock had, as
his first assignment, to figure out a way for farmers and
dairies to be able to measure the butterfat content of milk so
that the farmers and the dairies could deal honestly with each
other when they sold milk. The farmers had, until that
time, sold milk primarily by weight.
There was a powerful temptation to put a little water in the
milk and up the weight just a little bit.
And one could get around that subterfuge if he simply
determined the butterfat content.
It was also possible by determining the fat content of
each cow on your farm to figure out which of the cows was really
giving the best milk, and, thus, to breed cows to improve the
breed and to get better milk production.
So he did that. He invented a method that was
very simple, a device that was very simple.
I could hold it here in my hands.
It was a Babcock centrifuge, and a schoolboy could easily, in a
few minutes, determine the fat content of milk from each cow in
a dairy herd. That made him world famous, and
it was something he did without attempting to patent it, a fact
that he, at that time, felt was the right thing to do and,
subsequently, later he regretted.
I'll tell you a bit about that later.
At this time, there was a clear understanding of how one
assessed the goodness of food for animals.
We knew that there were three kinds of stuff in food,
proteins, fats, and carbohydrates, that animals
needed all three kinds, that if they got enough of each kind
they would be healthy. That was the party line, the
paradigm for examining feats, and the tools that chemists,
agricultural chemists, had then were well-suited to this
paradigm because they had tools to measure the contents of
nitrogen, content of protein, nucleic acid, not nucleic acid,
fat, and carbohydrate. And the only problem was the
farmers reported anecdotally that this wasn't true.
That not all diets containing these three things were equally
good. And Babcock had begun to suspect
that this might be the case as a young man on the farm, and while
he was here, he developed a program to test this paradigm to
see if, in fact, this was a suitable way to assess the
value, the goodness, of food. He chose to help him, EB Hart,
Edwin Hart, also born on a farm and grown up on a farm.
Went to school in Michigan, and he spent time in Kossel's
laboratory in Germany. Kossel subsequently won the
Nobel Prize for his work in biochemistry.
Hart, like several other of the people who came here, spent a
brief period at the New York Agricultural Experiment Station
in Geneva where he, too, like Babcock, had looked at things
like cheese ripening and the role of phosphorus in cheese
nutrition, I'm sorry, in animal nutrition.
He came here in 1906. Babcock came in 1888.
Hart came in 1906 to become the chairman of the agricultural
chemistry department. Babcock remained a guiding
spirit, but he was no longer the driving force behind these
experiments. And Hart actually retired many
years later, 1945. Over that time he made important
contributions to science and also tremendously important
contributions by training a serious of extremely productive
and successful scientists. Elmer McCollum was a young many
who came here not as a graduate student but as sort of an
instructor, I guess that's the closest title we would have for
him today. Born on a Kansas farm, educated
there and at Yale, he came here in 1907 and spent 10 very
productive years. He left here to go to Johns
Hopkins where he spent another 50 years doing extraordinarily
important work. One of the things he did was to
establish the McCollum-Pratt Institute for the study of
micronutrients. He became a student of human
nutrition out of the background here of agricultural/animal
nutrition. McCollum and Steenbock, the next
person we'll look at here, never got along well, and, in fact,
McCollum's departure may have been occasioned by the fact that
McCollum and Steenbock couldn't stand to be in the same town
with each other. When McCollum left, the story is
that he turned loose all of Steenbock's experimental
animals. [LAUGHTER]
Which is not a great way to say goodbye to somebody you care
about. So here's Harry Steenbock, who's
name is certainly familiar to anybody who grows up and lives
around here. Steenbock grew up in New
Holstein, studied here as an undergraduate, worked with EB
Hart as an assistant, and before he did his PhD work, he spent a
year in Europe with a very famous biochemist, Carl Neuberg,
came back and was one of the first students to get his PhD
with Hart and began with Hart work that he continued the rest
of his life investigating the nature of vitamin D, the role of
vitamin D in nutrition, the effects of vitamin D
deprivation. He became world famous for this
work, published an enormous string of papers, trained an
unbelievable number of students and people in laboratories
around the country. One of his last students was
Hector DeLuca who has just now retired from biochemistry at the
age of 80 or so after having continued Steenbock's work in
vitamin D in a dramatic, remarkable way.
Babcock's experiment, which is a very simple one, and the point
of it was a very simple question, namely is it true that
if you give an animal, in this case it was a cow, a heifer, the
appropriate amount of carbohydrate, fat, and protein,
then nothing else matters. The cow will be healthy.
He divided 16 cows into 4 groups.
They were all heifers that never calved.
He started them on diets that all contained the same amount of
carbohydrates, fats, and proteins but provided from
either all corn, all wheat, or all oats.
And then the fourth group the animals got a third of each kind
of grain in their diet. And in this experiment, which
Babcock conceived and Hart and Steenbock and McCollum carried
out, the idea was to see if over a long period of time it
mattered. Much to complain about earlier
studies of this sort was that nobody actually followed the
animals for a long time to see what the long-term effects of
the diet were. So they followed these animals.
The animals calved. They went through another year
and calved again. They recorded for all these
animals their weight gain, their health in general, the health of
the calves, the kind of milk that they produced, and so on.
And by the end of this experiment they had a very clear
result which was reported in what may have been the most
famous bulletin that ever came out of the Ag Experiment
Station, bulletin 17 in 1911, which was published by Hart,
McCollum, Steenbock, and Humphrey.
Humphrey was the animal husbandry professor who helped
immensely to take care of the animals that were in this study.
You'll notice that Babcock's name is not here.
He didn't sign all these papers even though he provided the
brain work for a lot of them. But the experiment can be
summarized with just a couple of pictures.
There was, on the left here, a cow and calf grown on oats.
Another one, on the right, grown on the mixture of three things.
In both cases, the cows prospered for the first year,
the heifers did, but the calves were not healthy.
In the third case, the cow on the left here grown entirely on
wheat, became early in the first year, and by the second year
gave birth to a dead calf. On the right is a cow that was
feed entirely on corn and the calf of that cow.
And although the calf looks to me like he got a bad paint job,
at least he was a healthy calf, and the result was that the diet
of all corn was clearly superior to these other diets, and it
wasn't, therefore, true that just getting enough
carbohydrate, fat, and protein was good enough.
There was something else, and this forced a complete
rethinking of the whole business of how to determine what to feed
animals and with it, not at the same moment, but with it came
the realization that talking about human nutrition also was
going to require more than just the very simplistic old
paradigm. The new paradigm was that if you
want to know what's good for an animal, you have to give the
animal a diet that is suboptimal and then figure out what you can
add to that diet that will make it optimal.
And those things that you add will constitute a fourth thing
that wasn't suspected before. It's not carbohydrates or fats
or proteins. It is, it turns out, vitamins.
Now, how to find this out. The trick was to raise animals,
first it was cows, later it was rats for reasons I'll show you
in a moment, feed them a diet that you knew was not wholly
adequate and then take some material, butter was one of the
things, milk was another, which when added to the inadequate
diet made it fully adequate. And then ask can I fractionate
this butter, can I fractionate the milk and figure out what it
is in here, what's the ingredient that is making the
animals healthier. McCollum, very early on,
recognized that doing this with heifers was going to be hopeless
and expensive and endless job, and so he went to Babcock and
said I think we should go to the dean and propose that we use
rats as experimental animals. And they did.
The two of them went to the dean, who was Russell then.
They asked him for a little money to build rat cages in the
basement of the building. The dean thew them out, said if
the farmers of this state ever heard that I was spending their
money encouraging people how to nourish rats...
[LAUGHTER] It wouldn't work.
So, in fact, he wouldn't give them a dime for this.
The two of them, Babcock and McCollum, came back here to talk
it over. Babcock said you take this money
and go to Chicago and get some rats.
[LAUGHTER] And so McCollum did.
He went to Chicago, he bought a couple of pairs of mating rats,
the kind that don't gnaw your arm off if you cross them, and
brought them back here. They became the source of rats
for all experiments that went on here and for experiments all
over the world. There was a long time during
which Madison had the two largest rat farms in the world.
It still has a very large such farm.
Rats had the tremendous advantage that they were cheaper
to feed, easier to house, took much less room, could be handled
in much larger numbers so that the experiments were statically
more significant, and, therefore, one could really get
a good answer to these questions without spending two lifetimes
at it. And with that new paradigm, with
that introduction of the new experimental animal, the rest
became history. There was a very quick
recognition all around the world of the importance of this new
paradigm. I should say that this discovery
of vitamins here was coincident with the discovery of vitamins
in two other places. So it's not fair to say that
this was a unique discovery here, but it took the world's
biochemists and nutritionists by surprise, and suddenly everybody
jumped in here to see if they could figure out what it was
that made pretty good food real good.
McCollum made a fairly important discovery early on when he found
that he could take the butter that was good when supplemented
to the bad food and fractionate it into one fat he called
fat-soluble, he called it fat-soluble A, and the other
water-soluble B. It turned out that what he
called fat-soluble A is we now know vitamins A, E, D, and K,
all which are indeed soluble in fat, and what he called
water-soluble B were the vitamins that we now call
vitamin B1, B6, B12, thiamine, folate, niacin, and so on.
So right away you had two different sets of things to look
at, and investigators all over the world began to look at them
in more detail to see if they could resolve the factors in
these foods that conferred good health.
McCollum essentially is focused on vitamin A, and we have, today
on this campus, several people whose research is the direct
continuation of his original work in vitamin A.
Steenbock tackled vitamin D, and has spent the rest of his life
on it. We have, on this campus, a
number of people whose work is a direct descendent of his work.
Elvehjem and Strong, Strong was still here when I came in 1971,
took the water-soluble fraction and fractionated it and
eventually discovered that the vitamin niacin, unrecognized
until then, was the cure for an extremely serious disease called
pellagra which was common in prisons and orphanages and any
place else that had diets that were invariant.
Esmond Snell looked at vitamin B6.
The group of Link and Phillips and Bowman and Suttie studied
over the years vitamin C and K and E.
And then there was group started by Hart but joined by Elvehjem,
Steenbock, and -- who looked at the mineral elements that were
present in various good rations which, when added to bad
rations, made them better. So it took a while because there
were a lot of elements, not just one thing, to be added back, and
little by little they were resolved.
Their chemical structures were determined.
Their roles were understood. And by early 1940s, say 1940
itself, there was a pretty clear understanding of what vitamins
were and what they did. Around the campus here, when the
construction finally ends, there will again be these brass
plaques that describe the work that went on in various places
around this end of the campus, and they include this plaque
that talks about the experiments under the direction of EB Hart
that set the stage for discovery of vitamins and essential trace
minerals. Single grain experiments
inspired by biochemist Babcock changed forever the way
scientists viewed diet and nutrition in humans and animals.
The vitamin A and vitamin B story is attributed primarily to
the early work that was done by McCollum.
The vitamin D work, we could easily talk for a whole hour
about the historical importance of that work, but it turned out
that there was, at this time in the 1920s and '30s, a very
serious disease in this part of the country called rickets.
And the disease, as we now understand it, is the result of
our not having enough vitamin D, and that is, in turn, a result
of our not being in the sun enough during the winter when
we're enclosed and don't get sun on our skin.
So Steenbock discovered a way that one could irradiate food.
Instead of having the sun shine on the people, you could have
the sun shine on the food, and that would make the food be a
source of good vitamin D, and that transformed a whole human
disease. There was no longer any reason
that anybody should suffer from this debilitating disease
rickets. Here's Steenbock holding this
very sophisticated piece of equipment that he used to
determine this. This is a UV lamp in his left
hand and the switch in his right hand and a rat's cage that is
irradiating. When we had to clear out of this
building there was a room up in that corner of the building,
1913 building, that had a little side room that had the UV lamp
hanging there where Steenbock did this.
And there was a sign on the wall that said don't look at the
lamp, stupid. It's not good for your eyes.
[LAUGHTER] We had to, of course, move that,
but I still have the lamp. There was a discovery of an
important for iron deficiency, anemia, of copper in the diet.
There were several human diseases and one serious animal
disease attributable to the lack of iron, and it turned out that
you couldn't make the diseases better by feeding more and more
iron, you had to also feed a whiff of copper, and this cured
that disease and made Hart and Elvehjem and Steenbock, again,
famous for their work. People on the east and west
coast who ate plenty of seafood never had a problem called
goiter, but people in the Midwest had lots of that
problem, especially before refrigerated transport was
possible. Your thyroid gland, located
right here, is in charge with making thyroid hormone, and it
can't do that unless it has iodine.
There's plenty of iodine in seawater, and so people who eat
fresh fish from the sea never have problems with this, but
those of us who lived in the Midwest didn't get enough
iodine, our thyroid glands would enlarge trying to make thyroid
hormone, and you ended up with somebody who looked like this.
And it was the simple discovery that a whiff of iodine, just the
slightest bit of iodine, completely transformed that.
And so now when you buy salt, you always buy iodized salt.
This was a development that Hart actually introduced.
Elvehjem and his colleague Frank Strong tackled a problem that
had been a very serious problem throughout the world.
As I said, in the 1900s, early, it was still a problem here as
well. Pellagra was rampant in jails
and orphanages. Half the people who lived in
places like this sometimes had this disease, and it was a fatal
disease if the diet wasn't improved eventually.
They studied a disease in dogs which was the analog of this
disease in humans. The dog disease was called black
tongue. The dogs were housed up under
the roof right up here in the third story of this building.
Terrible place. I can't imagine having 50 dogs
up there all barking at the same time with no air conditioning
and no water. It must have been wonderful.
But they used these dogs as the bioassay.
They could feed these dogs fractions of good food to see
what fraction was it that made the dogs healthy again.
And they discovered by this way that it was niacin, the vitamin
niacin, something that can be synthesized very cheaply by a
chemist and something which, therefore, was available to
anyone who needed it and which, therefore, cured this terrible
disease pellagra. So here was Curry.
He arrived about the end of this heroic period of vitamin
research, and he celebrated that in this painting that you see in
front of you. And the celebration was of the
process but also, I think, of the people.
Let's see if I can point these out to you.
There are, in this drawing, scientists.
There's one right there. A second.
A third and a fourth. All dressed in suits and ties,
so presumably they're not capable of actually working but
they were scientists. [LAUGHTER]
Then there is this woman who is right square in the
middle of the art, right square in the middle of the design,
and it's hard for me to believe that that's an accident.
All around her are the signs of poor and good health.
Over here, as Lauren pointed out, there's a child that has
the characteristic bowed legs of rickets.
Over here you don't see any bowed legs.
The animals over here are unhealthy; the ones to the right
are healthy. So Curry encapsulated in one
mural the social benefits of research.
Although the thing is called biochemical research, I think it
would have been better to name it agricultural chemistry
research because that's what it was.
This is in the hallway. As we go out, you'll be able to
see this right away. But then in a room next door to
it, there's this painting which Lauren also showed you.
So here's a fifth scientists. I thought it would be
interesting for us to see if we could guess who these scientists
were. So here they are.
Here's the guy with the goatee and the wire-rimmed glasses, and
I think there is no question at all that that's Stephen Babcock.
There is actually facial recognition software now that a
computer can use to find. [LAUGHTER]
I think it might be fun to attempt this, but I'm confident
that that was intended to be Babcock.
Babcock lived until 1931 so, of course, he didn't meet Curry,
but there were plenty of images, including the one right out here
in the hallway, that he could have worked from, the one in the
upper right-hand corner. McCollum may be this one.
The face looks about right. There's a good head of hair.
It's parted on the right side. There's a good, strong jaw and a
high cheek bone. And if I had to guess, I'd guess
maybe that's McCollum. Hart is not hard to recognize.
I'm sure this is Hart. Looks like every picture I've
seen of him. There's an interesting fact
about this, the Curry mural, that I've always wondered about,
and that is that it always looked to me as if somebody
tried to paint over a bald spot on his head.
[LAUGHTER] It may have been Hart himself.
He lived until 1953. [LAUGHTER]
Then there's no doubt whatever about who the man with
the UV lamp is. That's Steenbock.
And there he is on the left and on the right with his lamp in
the picture with the milk bottles that contain the milk
that he has irradiated. There are in the picture then
two other people who aren't identified.
One is this woman that I pointed out to be right square in the
middle, and the other is this scientist over here.
And I think it's possible that the scientist is George Humphrey
who is not sited any place else in the picture but he was an
essential part of this early experiment.
Humphrey was the man from animal husbandry that did this work.
I'm curious to know if Humphrey might have had red hair.
It's a little hard to find out looking at old black and white
pictures whether he had red hair or not.
In this picture it looks as if he's just recently come through
a fist fight with a right-handed slugger.
The left eye doesn't look great. And then the other, this is the
face of the woman I said was sort of a mystery woman.
And I wonder if this might be the woman Margaret Davis who is
sort of unsung but a hero of this time.
She was the right-hand man for McCollum, and he always said he
couldn't have done what he did without her.
She went on to a career in nutrition, although she didn't
get an advanced degree. So she actually was quite widely
regarded for that work. And when she was 80 she looked
like this over here which is a very handsome woman and could
easily have been the same as this one.
In any case, we probably won't know unless we can discover
something that the artist wrote that hasn't been found yet.
Do you know something about this?
No, no. >> Okay, all right.
The last thing I want to just mention to you is that 15 years
ago or so Mrs. Curry, who was then 99 years old, let the
department know that she had the original charcoals that were
used to draw this mural out here and that she was willing to sell
them for a price. And so we had a dealer bring
them to us and we looked at them and they really are very
beautiful charcoals, much more beautiful than this looks like
here, but they were too expensive.
So we sent them back. Then I wrote a letter to
Mrs. Curry and I said I'm an impoverished professor whose
office is right next to that mural and I've loved them all my
career, is there any chance that you could talk to me as a
private citizen about selling these things?
Well, she did and I bought them and we have them.
And some day soon we hope to hang these full sized charcoals
somewhere where you can look at them at the same time you see
the Curry murals. I hope that you'll enjoy looking
at them now. Is that what's next on the
schedule is to walk over here? All right, then if there are
questions, why don't you ask them here, and is there a
microphone some place? [APPLAUSE]