cc >> Tom Zinnen: Welcome,
everyone, to Wednesday
I'm Tom Zinnen. I work Nite at the Lab.
Center at UW-Madison. I also work for UW Extension
Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those folks and our
other sponsors, Wisconsin Public
Alumni Association, thanks for Television and the Wisconsin
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
[LAUGHTER] Whew, I day on Wednesday until 2040.
[LAUGHTER] Keeping hope to be here.
date, I get to introduce to you two splendid people who
are going to talk to you about
tonight. Dave Nelson the John Steuart Curry murals
biochemistry here at UW Madison where he has served for
40 years. His interests include the
history of science, and he's
senior UW professors teaching a course on historic research
breakthroughs here at Wisconsin.
and biology from St. Olaf's. His bachelor's is in chemistry
Medical School and His PhD is from the Stanford
Before coming to Madison, Dave is in biochemistry.
the Harvard Medical School. His sresearch interest is in theat
biochemistry of biological
Nobody has given more Wednesday sNite at the Labs than Dave.
Nelson, and nobody
[LAUGHTER] Lauren Kroiz is an assistant
professor in the Department of Art History here
at UW-Madison. She
Massachusetts Institute receivof Technology.m the
Before moving to Madison in 2010
Bowdoin College and a shepostdoctoral fellow at theat
Phillips Collection Center for
Washington, DC. Her thfirst book manuscript,in
entitled Creative Composites: Race, Modernism, and the
Stieglitz Circle, was awarded the 2010 Phillips Book Prize
and will be published by the
in the fall of 2012. She University of California Press
I mispronounced told it. It's Bowdoin.ce it.
It's okay. I'm not
I'm here. [LAUGHTER]
Please join me in welcoming Lauren to Wednesday
Nite at the Lab. [APPLAUSE]
Lauren Kroiz: Thanks, Tom.
inviting me to speak, and also So I want to thank Tom for
of the pictures that you Robin Davies who will take many
And I also want to thank Dave Nelson from biochemistry..
They've all been extremely
been quite some time since welcoming to me even though it's
So I'm excited to be here today. I've been in a lab.
everyone who worked so hard Ito save these murals before Ink
arrived on campus. So,
second here at UW, and I'm in the middle of my
And we tend to write out our I'm an art historian.
and talk from notes today taland we'll see how it goes.ry
I've been working on the project
which I think is a fascinating I'm going to talk about today,
time at Wisconsin. I've historbeen working on thisrry's
project for about six months, and for me it's part of a larger
story about Midwest regionalism,
in the 1930s and '40s in what arwe think of as the Rooseveltp
New Deal era. So I
quite prominently and I have feature my email up here
because I know a lot of you have lots of cards in my pocket
have a lot of information about bthe projects I'm going to talkd
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
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
Curry. And then I'll campus influenced John Steuart
professor Dave Nelson who will tell us more.
So, to begin, I only have time
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
this track pad. So here you see him with Thomas
Hart Benton, who's the
And you can see them, again, other one, and Grant Wood.
So in the 1930s these three artists became well known for
their regionalist, or it's also known as American scene style
painting. Although
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
these three were addition to be artistic allies,
In the mid-1930s they begin to really good friends.
Benton is on the cover of Time become increasingly famous.
spreads devoted to Curry's magazine, and there are large
So, in addition to making art, artwork also in Life.
interested in teaching artwork. eCurry and Benton teach at Theo
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
of that. Curry comes, as you can see on
the right, he comes and visits
quite good time. Unfortunately, Wood theWood taught forly has a
free at Stone City, and even
so it folded in 1933. It's with that the school lost money,
there's not that much money in teaching art.
But by 1934 Wood was able to
mural commissions to land a teaching job at the University
of Iowa. And Iowa is
is born. So he comes the state where Wood
state university. And in to teach at his
to capitalize on his fame, and 1935, Benton is also able
Kansas City Art Institute in he gets invited to teach at the
born. So for Wood, Missouri, the state where he was
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,
the regionalists rather than in the Midwest that
So Wood began to look around for claim to represent.
that he could work. It's a place for Curry, for a place
But they decided that there's no nice to have good friends.
hired at the University of way that Curry was going to get
where Curry was born. People Kansas, which was the state
there apparently really didn't in the art department
Kansas were slightly offended by the fact that Curry always
painted them being
His most famous paintings afwere of tornadoes.s.
[LAUGHTER] So Wood
And eventually he succeeded in didn't give up though.
And he gets him hired as an geartist in residence at the.
University of Wisconsin in
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,
It's still around Madison. which some of you may have seen.
presentation you might see I'll not now that in my
You might see it in the photograph on the far left here.
And that's just a security
American Art where I've mdownloaded a lot of thesef
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
Wisconsin would have been a welcoming place for Curry, and
just as a little plug for my art
don't get over to Wednesday Nite history department, I know we
to give you a brief sense of at the Lab that often, I'm going
1930s when Curry's looking what's going on here in the late
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
And he was, apparently, a very John Steuart Curry in 1942.
was controversial even when it red-faced man, but this portrait
unflattering. But Hagen was pis an immigrant fromghtly
Germany, and he was quite eager to understand American art.
The first graduate alumni of the
Porter Butts who some of you art history department here is
important book, this 1936 account of Wisconsin art, as
well as the gallery that's
So Hagen and Curry quickly named for him here on campus.
actually inscribes a copy of his became friends, and Hagen
in Art, which is one of the first accounts of American art,
to Curry. And here
"To John Steuart Curry, first of you can see it says,
admiration." So he has the Americans, in friendship and
history department, Hagen and Butts, in addition to James
Watrous, who would go on to be a
art history department. Here really important member of the
Paul Bunyan murals in 1936. These are murals that Curry
evidently admired when he arrived on campus, and they are
too still extant, of
Watrous was also really interested in advancing
experimental methods for
called the art teaching art history in what he
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
the dean of the agriculture school, Chris Christensen, who
you see here in both a
portrait. So plans photograph and Curry's painted
Wisconsin really began in earnest in the summer of 1936
when Wood approached Glen Frank,
university, and Dean Christensen who was president of the
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
farmers in art. Christensen lookihad been trained aterest
an agriculture school in Denmark
explained that he had experienced the "wide spread and
consuming pleasure that Danish
paintings." So he tillethought that American from
farmers could also share this consuming pleasure if art would
just approach them with subjects
understand. And this that they as farmers could
he's trying to advance when he brings Curry to campus.
So Curry moves from West Port,
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
[LAUGHTER] So it seemed to be that he could
just sort of do whatever he wanted.
His contract stipulated only
in residence "for development of that he would work as an artist
culture." And it seems regional as a force for rural
was the one who initially offered the model of the artist
in residence, and he was drawing
in the period. They on sowere beginning to havening
academic writers in residence,
artist in residence as something so he advances this idea of an
Curry actually officially that wojoin the faculty.n having
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
and the artist accepts authorized in September of 1936,
He seems to be really on board. His salary isn't funded by the
university but is, rather,
Fund of the Brittingham Estate. fAnd the university secured a
$400,000 grant from the State Emergency Fund to build him a
studio. So he gets
$4,000 a year, and he holds this a studio, he gets
until his death in 1946. So, position for a decade, from 1936
elastic plans for what he was going to do with his times
included murals and also
And he was charged particularly pto focus on soil erosion which.
was a pet subject of
And here you see a painting called Erosion and Contour
Cropping from circa,
And this in the Chazen around, 1936-1940.
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
pictorially in his own style." the subject and represent it
that what he's doing is not propaganda for any particular
kind of agriculture or any
rather, and attempt to cull pathe drama from rural life.t,
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
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
So here I show you another appointment in rural sociology.
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
"to establish and develop a feeling for art among the
agricultural students by discussing with them
agricultural as well
He wants to eliminate the inhibitions which non-urban
residents look upon painting. So
students were scared of thepainting, that they werere
inhibited from enjoying this
pleasure to their lives. So tby having this very manlyh
interaction, you can see he's dressed in a suit, he's got his
pipe, and he's painting this
it was thought that with the horse which they all understood,
would be able to spread this support of the dean that he
students. This is such love of art to the agriculture
why should farmers know how to paint or be interested in
painting? But really
for Curry there was a sense in for Christensen and
about art would make which teaching these farmers
So you can see, he does this them better citizens.
So he's teaching, here you can kind of thing all over campus.
students doing preliminary see he's instructing a group of
In the photograph on the left he's out in a field sketching
sheep. So he's spreading
even farmers should appreciate this idea that
for American audiences to arembrace in the same way thatt
those at the Danish folk school had.
He's doing that by being present
these students. He also ongoes to football games.ng
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
sketching them football team as he was
[LAUGHTER] Apparently, during a scrimmage.
and fall of 1937 the artist would appear regularly on
the sidelines during practice.
And this kind of thing was
regionalism. He told actually part of Curry's
like to reach the extent where audiences that he would
said, would take the same pride in their local painters as they
do in their ball teams. So
the same level as sports, especially impressive task at
Wisconsin, I will say. [LAUGHTER]
Football. Okay, so these
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
reproduced in this magazine for Abthat they put out.to be
And then Curry suggested that they donate the original
painting to the athletic department.
And it's somewhere
I'm not sure exactly where. If in Camp Randall.
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
So he was supposed to enable in his studio here on campus.
artist in the midst of creation. Wisconsinites to witness an
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,
see their lives to breflected by an artist. also
So some art historians have critiqued the work that he did
on campus. Here I show
on the right of a drawing of a you his activities
Hill. So some students group of students on Bascom
this kind of work as have critiqued
it's not as good as the kind of ilpowerful work that Curry didt
when he was still looking to
of his most famous paintings Kansas work, like probably one
So they say that Curry's most Bpowerful work was actually.
behind him by the time
Now, I'm interested, instead, in that he reached Wisconsin.
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
he's trying to think about the paintings but also the ways that
Depression. So to iunderstand Curry's role ate
Wisconsin, my claim is that it
history of art, looking neinstead to rural sociology.the
And this is the group with
program that had him accompany whom he worked on a rural arts
state in search of sociologists throughout the
And Curry's strongest ally at Wisconsin was actually in rural
sociology. It's John
see here with Curry. Rector Barton, who you
And they're at a rural art show. And then here's Curry.
Wisconsin's Farm Short Course, So Barton was the director of
the Department of and he Rural Sociology.ssor in
So Christensen, Dean
Barton, and he brought Barton back from Denmark where he had
been the director of the
And Barton arrives on campus International Peoples College.
strong tradition of the rural folk school, he arrives at the
same time that Curry
So they become close friends does in 1936.
Here you can see a flier for and really close allies.
think these cows are adorable. their rural art show, which I
this event which was So you can see this flier for
And to mount this event, Curry started in 1940.
throughout the Wisconsin and others sociologists traveled
and they were aided by countryside recruiting artists,
So the same people who you wee county extension agents.
farm problems you could also supposed to talk to about your
[LAUGHTER] It's talk ttotally fascinating,blems.
I think. So Curry shared Christensen and
Barton's beliefs about the power
world for rural people. He of art to create a more vital
radio interviews. You see spreone in the upper left.cal
I don't know who the
So if anybody knows, I guy is with him.
So he's interviewed during shows would love to know.
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.
families as well as city The thought is that country
advantages of culture that are families should have the
halls, and libraries. So found in art galleries, concert
claim. His claim is thisthat art should becal
viewed as a practical thing,
And he encouraged people to hang that everybody should have art.
in their homes, in their paintings of their communities
rather than prints of famous schools, in their libraries
paintings. So he buildings or prints of famous
original artwork that represented their own place.
He believed, he said, that "if
well-bred and excellent herd of cattle or a prize-winning horse
or developed an unusual food
celebrated and good paintings on the walls of community
buildings, we will
So there this idea that if you be a better nation."
have a painting of it on the have a good horse, you should
radical claim. And with wallCurry's collaboration,te a
the Department of Agriculture also introduced arts practice
into agricultural instruction.
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
they started that rural eart exhibition that I wasr,
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
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
attention. This is attracted national
magazine which prominently a page from Life
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
He also creates sand painting landscapes, which you might be
able to see up here, and all the
Wisconsin. And, of different species of birds in
this shepherd's pipe, which he course, he's playing
tree. On the left carved is one of Sugden'sternut
paintings and, on the right, a
give you a sense of what painting by Lord --, just to
of rural artists was the work that these kinds
It inspired one enthusiastic creating looked like.
from Life magazine, to proclaim "when art can hold its own with
prize cows, it is in
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
frame productive news ways in which we might understand art's
relationship with healthy states.
Curry dies somewhat unexpectedly
their project, producing in 1946, but Barton continues
Wisconsin, in 1948. The thiartists were chosen byof
Curry, and it prominently features Sugden's sand
paintings. So we can
about the murals talk in more detail
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
that biochemistry can it's mhave on the farm.values
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 is much more resolved. It this mural Curry's depiction of
landscape. He's much creates a kind of picturesque
making these new weird methods more successful at
integrating them of contour plowing picturesque,
And that's really what I want to into the landscape.
these murals, their ability clato make these scientificof
breakthroughs seem natural. So
I took myself, you can see here, in this bad photo that
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
tradition. Let's skip is linkthat because I'mlonger
running out of time. Okay.
So finally, in the large panel
way that this is a in the hallway, you can see the
The little boy, on the left, the family who's suffering.
has pellagra. So it's littlecertainly about thehe girl
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
prized cows and prized artwork it's also about the way that
different. So I'll shouldn't be considered all that
thanking the conservators and all you guys who helped preserve
these murals and who couldn't be
and librarians who here, as well as the archivists
So thank you. [APPLAUSE]
Next up, Dave Nelson.
Dave Nelson: Thank you, Lauren.
I think I learned more about
than I've learned by living Curnext to them for 30 years.our
Let me just have a second here to switch gears.
Switching gears isn't as
easy a[LAUGHTER]to be.
There we go. As you walked in tonight, if you
came in the front door of this
bronze plaque commemorating the work of Stephen Babcock who wass
one of the first and most prominent members of the
department of what was then called agricultural chemistry,
which has since been
And I've walked by that myself a called biochemistry.
in 40 years. I've had thoustudents walk by it 40ose,
times a semester to come hear my
the end of 40 lectures, still lcan't tell you what Stephenat
Babcock did to get his
They think perhaps he plainvented ice cream.re.
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
So the college was trying very aimed at aiding agriculture.
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
with buildings. There populwere fields and sheepe and
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
McCollum, Elvehjem, but coessentially planned by and,
inspired by Stephen Babcock.
actually began before Ththis building was built.ng
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
And, finally, they came to they were housed in Ag Hall.
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
fruition, and he was hired to bring it to
He came here in 1888. I'll certainly did so.
his career in a few moments. tell you a bit more about
great chooser of people because he quickly accumulated a group
around him that included Hart and McCollum and Steenbock and,
eventually, Elvehjem, a very
very important science. He powerful group of people who did
with the dean, Harry Russell, who took seriously the college's
responsibility to farmers, but
good, solid, also their responsibility to do
Russell, himself, had been a well-documented science.
and when he came here as the very well-respected scientist,
first things he told his small dean of the college, one of the
fundamental research, and it faculty was do it right, do good
into practical things will hain agriculture.at goes
So let's just take, quickly, a
people that constituted the nucleus of agricultural chemists
then. Babcock was born in New York
state on a sheep farm.
then. He went to Everybody was born on a farm
He had planned to go to graduate school at Tufts.
young, and so Babcock actually school but his father died
10 years. Eventually ran the family farm for almost
studied in Gottingen, and at he went to Europe,
as in the United States, the that time, in Gottingen as well
chemistry was to use chemistry real goal of agricultural
make animals, and to some to extent people, healthy. to
And I want to tell you about the
it took progressed and, as a way that the thinking about what
work, changed dramatically. So Babcock spent some time at
the Agricultural Experiment Station at Cornell.
He was briefly at the New York
where he began the work that Agricultural Experiment Station
products. And then became his life's work on dairy
as, essentially, the Department of Agricultural Chemistry.
Babcock did two things that would have each made him world
famous. The first,
talk about tonight except really I'm not proposing to
his first assignment, to figure to out a way for farmers and, as
dairies to be able to measure the butterfat content of milk so
that the farmers and the dairies
other when they sold milk. could deal honestly with each
time, sold milk The primarily by weight.hat
There was a powerful temptation to put a little water in the
milk and up the weight
And one could get around just a little bit.
determined the that subterfuge if he simply
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,
breed and to get better to bremilk production.ve the
So he did that. He
very simple, a device inthat was very simple.was
I could hold it here in my hands.
It was a Babcock centrifuge, and
few minutes, determine the fat a schoolboy could easily, in a
a dairy herd. That made contehim world famous, andcow in
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
paradigm because they had tools thto measure the contents ofs
nitrogen, content of protein, nucleic acid, not nucleic acid,
fat, and carbohydrate. And
farmers reported anecdotally the only problem was the
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
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
Went to school in Michigan, and he spent time in Kossel's
laboratory in Germany.
Nobel Prize for his Koswork in biochemistry.the
Hart, like several other of the people who came here, spent a
brief period at the New York
in Geneva where he, too, like ABabcock, had looked at thingsn
like cheese ripening and the
nutrition, I'm sorry, rolein animal nutrition.eese
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
experiments. And Hart the actually retired manythese
years later, 1945. Over that time he made important
contributions to science and
contributions by training a serious of extremely productive
and successful scientists. Elmer
who came here not as a graduate student but as sort of an
instructor, I guess that's the
him today. Born on a closest title we would have for
there and at Yale, he came Kansas farm, educated
productive years. He here in 1907 and spent 10 very
Hopkins where he spent another left here to go to Johns
important work. One of 50 years doing extraordinarily
establish the McCollum-Pratt the things he did was to
micronutrients. He became Insta student of humany of
nutrition out of the background here of agricultural/animal
nutrition. McCollum and Steenbock, the next
person we'll look at here, never
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
name is certainly familiar to anybody who grows up and lives
around here. Steenbock
Holstein, studied here as an grew up in New
Hart as an assistant, and before undergraduate, worked with EB
year in Europe with a very he did his PhD work, he spent a
came back and was one of the famous biochemist, Carl Neuberg,
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
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
age of 80 or so after having retired from biochemistry at the
vitamin D in a dramatic, continued Steenbock's work in
Babcock's experiment, which is a remarkable way.
of it was a very simple question, namely is it true that
if you give an animal, in this
appropriate amount of carbohydrate, fat, and protein,e
then nothing else matters.
He divided 16 cows The cow will be healthy.
They were all heifers that never calved.
He started them on diets that all contained the same amount of
carbohydrates, fats, and
either all corn, all proteins but provided from
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
out, the idea was to see if over a long period of time itd
mattered. Much to complain about earlier
studies of this sort was that nobody actually followed the
animals for a long time to see
the diet were. So they what the long-term effects of
The animals calved. They followed these animals.
and calved again. They went through another year
animals their weight gain, their recorded for all these
the calves, the kind of milk health in general, the health of
And by the end of this that they produced, and so on.
result which was reported in experiment they had a very clear
famous bulletin that ever came out of the Ag Experiment
Station, bulletin 17 in 1911, which was published by Hart,
McCollum, Steenbock,
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
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
There was, on the left here, a couple of pictures.
Another one, on the right, grown cow and calf grown on oats.
In both cases, the cows oprospered for the first year,.
the heifers did, but the
In the third case, the cow on the left here grown entirely on
wheat, became early in the first
gave birth to a dead calf. On the right is a cow that wasr
feed entirely on corn and the calf of that cow.
And although the calf looks to
at least he was a healthy calf, and the result was that the diet
of all corn was clearly superior
wasn't, therefore, true tothat just getting enoughit
carbohydrate, fat, and
There was something else, and this forced a complete
rethinking of the whole business
animals and with it, not at the osame moment, but with it cameed
the realization that talking
going to require more than about human nutrition also was
paradigm. The new juparadigm was that if yould
want to know what's good for an animal, you have to give the
animal a diet that is suboptimal
add to that diet that and twill make it optimal.ou can
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
Now, how to find this out. The turns out, vitamins.
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.
this butter, can I fractionate And then ask can I fractionate
is in here, what's the the milk and figure out what it
animals healthier. ingredient that is making the
recognized that doing this with heifers was going to be hopeless
and expensive and endless job,
said I think we should go to the and so he went to Babcock and
rats as experimental dean and propose that we use
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
money encouraging people heard that I was spending their
[LAUGHTER] It wouldn't work.
So, in fact, he wouldn't
The two of them, Babcock and give them a dime for this.
it over. Babcock said McCollyou take this moneyto talk
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
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
in much larger numbers so that much less room, could be handled
more significant, and, the experiments were statically
a good answer to these questions therefore, one could really get
at it. And with that without spending two lifetimes
that introduction of the new new paradigm, with
became history. There experimwas a very quicke rest
recognition all around the world
paradigm. I should say of the importance of this new
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
jumped in here to see if they sucould figure out what it wasdy
that made pretty
McCollum made a fairly important good food real good.
that he could take the butter that was good when supplementedd
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
all which are indeed soluble know vitamins A, E, D, and K,
water-soluble B were the in fat, and what he called
vitamin B1, B6, B12, thiamine, vitamins that we now call
So right away you had two different sets of things to look
at, and investigators all over
in more detail to see if they thcould resolve the factors inm
these foods that
McCollum essentially is focused on vitamin A, and we have, today
on this campus, several people
continuation of his original work in vitamin A.t
Steenbock tackled vitamin D, and
on it. We have, has spon this campus, ais life
number of people whose work is a
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
until then, was the cure for an extremely serious disease called
pellagra which was common in
place else that had diets prisothat were invariant.d any
Esmond Snell looked at vitamin B6.
The group of Link and Phillips
over the years vitamin and Bowman and Suttie studied
And then there was group started C and K and E.
Steenbock, and -- who looked at bthe 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
little by little one thing, to be added back, and
Their chemical structures thwere determined..
Their roles were understood.
itself, there was a pretty clear And by early 1940s, say 1940
were and what they did. Around understanding of what vitamins
construction finally ends, there the campus here, when the
plaques that describe the work will again be these brass
around this end of the campus, that went on in various places
that talks about the experiments and they include this plaque
that set the stage for discovery under the direction of EB Hart
minerals. Single of vitamins and essential trace
inspired by biochemist Babcock grain experiments
scientists viewed diet and changed forever the way
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
about the historical importance of that work, but it turned out
that there was, at this time
serious disease in this part in the 1920s and '30s, a very
And the disease, as we now of the country called rickets.
our not having enough vitamin D, understand it, is the result of
of our not being in the sun enough during the winter whent
we're enclosed and don't
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
source of good vitamin D, and that transformed a whole human
disease. There was
that anybody should suffer no longer any reason
rickets. Here's fromSteenbock holding thisease
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
irradiating. When we had hand and a rat's cage that is
building there was a room up in that corner of the building,
1913 building, that had a little
hanging there where side Steenbock did this.V lamp
And there was a sign on the wall
lamp, stupid. It's not that said don't look at the
[LAUGHTER] We had to, of course, move that,
but I still have the lamp.
important for iron deficiency, There was a discovery of an
There were several human anemia, of copper in the diet.
disease attributable to the lack diseases and one serious animal
you couldn't make the diseases of iron, and it turned out that
iron, you had to also feed a better by feeding more and more
that disease and made Hart and whiff of copper, and this cured
famous for their work. Elvehjem and Steenbock, again,
coast who ate plenty of seafood Pnever had a problem called
goiter, but people in the Midwest had lots of that
problem, especially before
possible. Your thyroid refrigerated transport was
right here, is in charge with making thyroid hormone, and it
can't do that unless
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
iodine, our thyroid glands would Midwest didn't get enough
hormone, and you ended up with enlarge trying to make thyroid
And it was the simple discovery that a whiff of iodine, just the
slightest bit of iodine,
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
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
and orphanages. Half the rampant in jails
places like this sometimes had people who lived in
disease if the diet wasn't this disease, and it was a fatal
They studied a disease in dogs improved eventually.
disease in humans. The dog which was the analog of this
tongue. The dogs disease was called black
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
and no water. It must time have been wonderful.ning
But they used these dogs as the bioassay.
They could feed these dogs
what fraction was it that fmade 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,
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
front of you. And the in thcelebration was of theee in
process but also, I think, of the people.
Let's see if I can point
There are, in this these out to you.
There's one right drthere. A second.s.
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
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
Over here, as Lauren pointed of poor and good health.
the characteristic out, there's a child that has
Over here you don't bsee any bowed legs.s.
The animals over here are unhealthy; the ones to the right
are healthy. So Curry encapsulated in one
mural the social
Although the thing is called benefits of research.
would have been better to name biochemical research, I think it
research because it agricultural chemistry
This is in the hallway. As that's what it was.
see this right away. But we go out, you'll be able 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
I think there is no question at all that that's Stephen Babcock.
There is actually facial
computer can use to recognitfind. [LAUGHTER] that a
I think it might be fun to
that that was intended attempt this, but I'm confident
Babcock lived until 1931 so, of course, he didn't meet Curry,
but there were plenty of images,
in the hallway, that he could have worked from, the one in the
upper right-hand corner.
The face looks about right. There's a good head of hair.
It's parted on the right side.
high cheek bone. And if I Therhad to guess, I'd guessand a
maybe that's McCollum. Hart is not hard to recognize.
I'm sure this is Hart. Looks
seen of him. There's like every picture I've
about this, the Curry mural, an interesting fact
and that is that it always that I've always wondered about,
tried to paint over a loobald spot on his head.dy
[LAUGHTER] It may have
He lived until 1953. [LAUGHTER]
Then there's no doubt whatever
the UV lamp is. abThat's Steenbock.ith
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
One is this woman that I pointed aren't identified.
middle, and the other is out to be right square in the
And I think it's possible that this scientist over here.
who is not sited any place else thin the picture but he was aney
essential part of this
Humphrey was the man from animal early experiment.
I'm curious to know if Humphrey husmight have had red hair.k.
It's a little hard to find out
pictures whether he lookihad red hair or not.white
In this picture it looks as if
a fist fight with a he's right-handed slugger.rough
The left eye doesn't look great.
face of the woman I said was And then the other, this is the
And I wonder if this might be the woman Margaret Davis who is
sort of unsung but a
She was the right-hand man for hero of this time.
couldn't have done what McCollhe did without her.aid he
She went on to a career in
get an advanced degree. So she nutrition, although she didn't
regarded for that work. And when she was 80 she looked
like this over here which is a
easily have been the very handsome woman and could
In any case, we probably won't same as this one.
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
used to draw this mural out here original charcoals that were
them for a price. And so and that she was willing to sell
them to us and we looked at them and they really are very
beautiful charcoals, much more
here, but they were beautifutoo expensive.oks like
So we sent them back. Then I wrote a letter to
Mrs. Curry and I said I'm an
office is right next to that impoverished professor whose
career, is there any chance mthat you could talk to me as ay
private citizen about selling these things?
Well, she did and I bought
And some day soon we hope to them and we have them.
somewhere where you can look at hthem at the same time you sees
the Curry murals. I hope
at them now. Is that that you'll enjoy looking
schedule is to walk over here? what's next on the
questions, why don't you ask All right, then if there are
microphone some place? them here, and is there a
[APPLAUSE]