cc  >> Paul Rogovitch: Good  afternoon, and welcome again to  History Sandwiched In.  Today's speaker will be talking  about Stephen Babcock, EB Hart  and the Wisconsin Hunger  Fighters.  It's professor David Nelson,  Professor of Biochemistry here  at the university.  And you know, when I hear  Babcock, I always think of  Babcock Hall ice cream.  I just want you to know that if  you go upstairs to the fourth  floor to the Odd Wisconsin  exhibit, you'll see a bucket  with a long handle on it that  Stephen Babcock used to collect  cow manure.  Right upstairs on the fourth  floor.  Don't miss it.  But please, let's welcome to  History Sandwiched In,  professor David Nelson.  (applause)  >> David Nelson: I'm going to  spend just a few minutes today  setting the background for the  history that I want to discuss  with you.  And the background, from my  point of view, is that for many  years, I've taught biochemistry  to students generally who are  juniors or seniors in college. 

 And every year, I tell them  about the discoveries in  biochemistry over the last  century or more.  But I almost always realize that  for them, this is not real.  That is, the students hear about  the science, but not about the  people.  So usually at the end of my  course, I ask the students if  they happen to know who this guy  is, that they've been walking by  every single day on the way to  class, for a year.  It's Stephen Babcock.  But most of them either don't  know who he is, or haven't any  idea why his figure is on the  front of the biochemistry  department.  It turns out that he was an  amazing character, and the cause  of a major scientific  revolution.  It took place in Madison around  1913, a revolution that still  has echoes, even in today's  science.  So I want us to look together at  that period around 1900 or 1890,  when Babcock was here, the  College of Agriculture looked  something like this.  This is, I think, looking from  the lake toward Ag Hall, and the  several buildings of the Ag  campus. 

 But at that time, there were  sheep grazing on campus.  There were lots and lots of  grassy areas, not like it is  today.  Here's the dairy barn.  In fact, in this dairy barn, the  famous experiments of Babcock's  that I'm about to tell you  about, took place.  This dairy barn was recently  declared a National Monument.  It's the only such barn in the  world, I guess.  And the place where much of the  science that I'm going to tell  you about took place, was this  old Department of Biochemistry  building, on Henry Mall.  It was built in 1912.  The cast of characters are  these.  And in fact, there are more. 

 But these will suffice for our  time together today.  Armsby was the first chairman of  this department, of what was  called Agricultural Chemistry  then.  Then, Stephen Babcock joined the  department and became the  chairman in 1888.  And he lived until 1931, though  he retired well before that.  And Hart, his successor as  chairman, he was there from  1906, and acted as chairman from  1913 until 1945.  He lived a long life in the  saddle there in biochemistry.  The others from this list,  McCollum, Steenbock, Link and  Elvehjem may be names that are  familiar to you.  Each of them has some kind of a  building named for them on the  campus.  And each of them has made a  really significant contribution  to some aspect of nutrition or  biochemistry.  You may have noticed around  campus the brass plaques that  someone had the good insight to  put out. 

 They are placed in front of the  building where a certain  scientific discovery took place.  This is the first one I want to  point out to you.  It commemorates the fact that  the College of Agriculture,  almost from the day of its  inception, was a place where  scientific research took place  to try to help farmers to raise  their crops and healthier  animals.  There was a Dean, Harry Russell,  who was also a famous  bacteriologist.  And he made his reputation early  here by discovering that there  was a bad infection of  tuberculosis among the cow herds  of Wisconsin.  And he showed how to recognize  this, and cull the herds.  He was succeeded by William  Henry, who was the Dean during  much of the time that I'm going  to tell you about today.  Babcock himself was born on a  farm in New York state.  He grew up there.  He left the farm when he was 18  to go to college at Tufts in  Boston. 

 But his father died young, and  he had to go back and run the  family farm for ten years or so.  But after that, as a middle aged  man, went off to Göttingen,  where he studied what was then  called agricultural chemistry,  in a very famous department,  where he brushed shoulders with  some people who had made 19th  century chemistry famous in  Europe.  And his work at Göttingen and  his work from then on had to do  with figuring out using the  tools of a chemist, what the  value of foods was as nutrients,  primarily for animals.  But of course, it also follows  that if it works for animals, it  works for people.  After some time at Göttingen, he  returned to Cornell Ag Station  for a brief period, then to  New York Ag Station, this is  in Geneva, a very famous Ag  Station, where most of the  agricultural chemists in the  country were trained.  And while there, he got involved  weekly in analysis of milk,  which of course, is a major  product of many of the farms at  the time, both in New York  and Wisconsin.  In 1888, he was called to  Wisconsin.  And this is about what he looked  like at that time.  He became the chairman, and  essentially, the only member of  the Department of Agricultural  Chemistry.  During this time, there was a  real ferment in agriculture, and  that was true in Wisconsin and  other places, as well. 

 Milk had stopped being simply a  product that you kept on the  farm with you to raise your own  family, and it had become a  commercial product.  The size of dairy herds was  increasing, with some automation  of some of the features of  husbandry.  And one of the big economic  problems that had come up as a  result of this increase in milk  as a commercial product was that  it wasn't easy for a farmer or a  dairy to figure out what milk  was really worth.  Not all milk was equally good.  Some milk has a lot more cream  than others, therefore more  valuable in making butter.  And so, the question came up,  how do you evaluate milk,  especially in terms of how much  fat there is in it, how much  cream, and how much protein,  which is what's converted  into cheese.  The problem was that farmers  didn't have any way to be  monitored.  They were tempted to either just  skim off the cream, and keep it  for themselves before they sold  the milk, or water the milk to  increase its volume and weight,  and thus get more money for what  was, of course, inferior milk.  So Babcock, when he came here,  was assigned the job by the  Dean, of figuring out a way to  evaluate the milk that was  effective, easy and could be  done on all levels, at the farm  and at the dairy as well.  Here's another plaque that  commemorates what he did. 

 Stephen Babcock, 1890, developed  a test after considerable work,  he worked in a laboratory for  several years on this, which has  been said to have made more  farmers honest than the Bible,  the Babcock butterfat test.  That test was performed with a  simple apparatus like this.  This is a Babcock centrifuge.  In a simple bottle like this.  I don't know if you can see it.  I might have more pictures.  There's the apparatus.  These bottles were filled with  milk using a pipette that would  take up just exactly the right  amount of milk.  You'd put that in here.  Then, whether you're a schoolboy  or an old guy, you'd take  sulfuric acid, concentrated and  quite bad stuff, pour a given  amount in here. 

 Let the acids digest the milk,  and then place the Babcock  bottle here, spin it, and this  was simply a way of speeding the  separation of the cream from the  milk.  Cream floated because it's  lighter.  And the vessel here is  calibrated along the top, so we  can read right off of that what  the butterfat content of the  milk was.  And this was a huge improvement  in the quality control on dairy  farms.  Here's a picture of one that was  for sale for four dollars, one  of those apparatuses.  I bought this on eBay for $80,  so it was a real good investment  in 1900.  There they are.  I'm actually surprised when I  read the instructions that go  along with this, that nothing is  said about the fact that the  sulfuric acid involved here is  pretty corrosive stuff.  And I wouldn't want my child to  be using it.  But apparently, it wasn't  considered too much more serious  than other dangers on the farm. 

 This is old Babcock, late in his  life.  And he's beside another machine  that accomplishes the same  thing, but with many samples.  This is a picture from 1920,  I think.  This is that same instrument  that still stands in the  Department of Dairy Science.  It's on the east vestibule of  Babcock Hall.  These multi-sample Babcock  testers allowed one to not only  determine the milk composition  for all the milk collected by a  dairy, but you could actually do  this for each cow, and thus,  figure out which of your cows  are giving the good milk, that  is, with the most cream.  You could pick out your best  cow, well, now you can.  And this, therefore, not only  made the dairy industry honest,  but it also made it possible to  breed cows for their high  quality of milk.  You could watch over time and  see which cows performed  especially well.  This is getting a little ahead  of my story, but Hart, whose  name I'll soon flesh out for  you, developed a similar test  using the same apparatus, that  was able to measure the amount  of protein in milk. 

 Now, between Babcock and Hart,  they've covered the two  important commercial aspects of  milk: fat and protein.  But the thing that made Babcock  famous was the experiment that I  want to tell you about now, and  spend most of our time on.  Here's Babcock seated in front  of an analytical balance.  And that really is quite  symbolic, because much of what  he accomplished as a scientist  was accomplished by examining,  using the balance as his tool,  the composition of feed, animal,  plant, manure, so that he could  compare various things as to  their quality as foods, and the  effects of their quality on  animals.  I have Babcock's balance in my  office now.  I watch it every day and think  of what a remarkable man he was.  To set the story here, in 1900,  the current hypothesis, the  paradigm for how to evaluate  foods hadn't changed in at least  a hundred years.  By 1800, chemists had developed  the tools for measuring things  such as how much fat, how much  protein, how much carbohydrate,  how much inorganic material.  And the big guns in agriculture,  mainly Leibig, a German chemist,  had decided that what matters in  the feed is just three things.  Is there enough protein?  And protein which contains  nitrogen is typically measured  by just measuring the nitrogen. 

 Is there enough fat?  Is there enough carbohydrate to  provide energy.  And if so, then this is an  adequate feedstock.  So, all you had to do to  evaluate a feed is measure its  chemical composition.  And any combination of foods  gave the right amounts of  protein, fat and carbohydrate  should, according to this  hypothesis, be a good feed.  But farmers knew better.  They had seen over the years  that there were things that were  better than others, but nobody  had attempted to quantitate  this.  Here, by the way, are two of the  heroes of European science, that  had sort of decided what animals  and people should eat, Leibig on  the left, the world's most  famous chemist, and Lyon  Playfair on the right, a name  that came from Gilbert and  Sullivan.  If you look at this guy and ask  yourself, if he told you to eat  your spinach, would you eat it?  My answer is yes, very quickly I  would.  In any case, they had endorsed  this notion that food could be  evaluated by simply looking at  its composition.  Now, comes onto the scene,  EB Hart. 

 He was hired by Babcock to come  and help Babcock carry out an  experiment that Babcock had  started, but in a very small  way, and too small a way to get  good results.  The experiment was aimed at  determining whether all kinds of  food were equally good, or if  some were better than others.  Babcock doubted that they were  all equal, because he had gone  to his mentor at the Geneva Ag  Station in New York with two  analyses that he presented and  asked what the mentor thought of  them as foods.  The mentor said they looked  about equally good to him.  And then, Babcock revealed that  one of them was the analysis of  the food the cattle had been  eating, and the second was the  analysis of the manure they were  producing.  So clearly, the simple chemical  analysis wasn't covering  everything.  And he, therefore, set about to  do an experiment that tested  whether there were other things  in food that were as important  or more important than things  already known about.  He needed help.  And the help came in the form of  Hart and two others that I'll  show you in a moment.  Hart, like Babcock, was born on  a farm and grew up on a farm  with 13 sisters and brothers. 

 He got his degree at Michigan.  Then, like most scientists in  that era, he went to Europe for  his finishing training.  He worked with a famous  biochemist called Kossel, who  actually won the Nobel Prize for  his discovery of DNA many years  ago.  He went, like Babcock did, to  the state Ag Station in Geneva  in New York, where he studies  cheese ripening and phosphorous  in nutrition, two things that  turned out to be crucial to his  continued work here in  Wisconsin, where he arrived in  1906 to take over Ag Chem.  He retired many years later with  a real record of accomplishment.  But one of the remarkable things  I'll tell you about is that he  didn't take much credit for his  accomplishments.  In fact, he often didn't put his  name on papers that he  contributed significantly to.  This was just another of his  traits that he shared with  Babcock.  Here is one of the two young men  who were hired at this time by  Hart to help in the experiment  that we're going to talk about  here.  One is McCollum, from a Kansas  farm family. 

 He got a degree from Kansas,  and then from Yale.  He came here in 1907,  so just after Babcock.  He left here after ten years on  the faculty to go to Johns  Hopkins, where he stayed  for 50 years.  And he became a world famous  biochemist and agricultural  chemist.  So he certainly added luster  to this group.  And then, the fourth person,  besides Hart, Babcock, McCollum,  was Harry Steenbock, whose name  is probably familiar to you  because he became a major  philanthropist in this area.  Many of the buildings that we  have here are named for him.  He grew up in New Holstein,  Wisconsin.  He went here to the university  for his bachelor's degree.  He went to work for Hart as an  assistant, which in those days,  was sort of a low-grade tenure  track position that would  eventually lead to his being  hired as a professor. 

 He spent a year with Carl  Neuberg in Germany, as was so  common.  He got his PhD in 1916 with Hart  as his mentor.  And Harry Steenbock's name will  always be associated with his  discovery related to Vitamin D.  But as you'll see, he was  involved in much broader studies  that had impacts throughout the  area of nutrition.  During his life, he published  250 papers, which is quite a  production.  And he trained 48 graduate  students, which is a remarkable  production.  So here's the experiment that  Babcock was proposing, to ask  whether there was something in  food besides carbohydrates, fats  and proteins that was essential  to nutrition.  He managed to get the Dean of  the Ag School to give him 16  heifers, young cows.  And he divided them into four  groups.  One of which was fed entirely on  corn products. 

 He made a mixture of the corn  kernel itself, and the stalk and  the leaves, that gave a certain  amount of carbohydrate, fat and  protein.  The second group, the four cows,  got all wheat, but exactly the  same amount of protein,  carbohydrate and fat.  The third got all oats.  And the fourth got one-third  mixture of corn, wheat and oats.  So according to the current  paradigm for nutrition, all of  these animals should have been  equally well nourished, and the  results should be that they all  grow up at the same rate, their  calves should be really healthy,  and so on.  So they followed the growth of  the heifer herself, the milk  production, the health of the  calves over a period of two  years, very carefully  quantitating everything they  could measure, from these 16  cows.  And as I say, the paradigm said  they should not have differed  in the results.  The results of the experiment  were published in the most  famous publication that has ever  come out of Wisconsin,  so called Bulletin 17.  It's in this book I brought  along for us here,  the 28th annual report, 1907.  I think that's the date. 

 It was called "Physiological  Effect on Growth and  Reproduction of Rations Balanced  from Restricted Sources."  So this is the so-called single  grain experiment, to ask if all  grains had the same  effectiveness in nourishing an  animal.  Here are some pictures from that  famous paper.  Here's the cow that was fed  entirely on oats after several  years.  Here's the calf.  Wholly on oats.  The cow grew fairly normally.  The calves were either dead on  arrival or were very ill, very  weak.  Here is the mixture cow,  of three different grains,  mixed in equal amounts.  The cow grew fairly well.  The calves were not as healthy,  and sometimes were born  prematurely, and were sometimes  actually sick. 

 Here is the wheat cow, whose  calves were born dead.  And here's the corn cow, who was  herself very healthy, and a very  healthy calf, always, that was  the result that they always  obtained.  And this, of course, was  contradictory to the idea that  every food source was equally  good.  So, this was the occasion for  one of those amazing things that  happens now and then in science,  when for years and years  scientists have been beating  their heads against a problem,  using a certain way to frame the  problem, a certain paradigm, and  then somebody says, wait a  minute, this paradigm is wrong.  If we just looked at it this  way, we could make sense of it.  And the paradigm shift that  occurs is what makes science  exciting.  Suddenly, there's an outburst  of new ideas and new experiments  and new findings.  So the old paradigm said if you  chemically analyze food, you'll  know what's good.  The new paradigm said, you have  to analyze it biologically, that  is, you have to ask, does it  help the cow to be better  nourished, does it help the  calf?  You have to have some analysis  that measures its biological  effect.  And this turned out to be a huge  race all over the world. 

 In Britain, there was a group of  people who raced neck and neck  with the people at Wisconsin.  And at the Ag Station in New  York, there was another group.  But the idea was to give animals  a basal diet that supplied their  calories and their protein and  their fat, but was not adequate  as judged by the fact that the  calves were not healthy, for  example.  And then, to that basal diet,   you added things that you  thought might have the good  stuff, the stuff that was in  corn, but not in oats, not in  wheat.  One of the things that they  discovered very early on in this  experiment was that if they  added butter to a bad ration,  everything was fine.  There was something in butter  that wasn't carbohydrates, fats  or proteins, and really did help  the health of the animal.  So, it became possible to use  this as the set up to  fractionate butter, to see what  was it in the butter that was so  important in nutrition.  And all kinds of efforts were  made to fractionate butter and  other good foods to see what the  good items were.  McCollum, the young man,  realized early on that if they  had to do this sort of thing  with cows, it was going to take  forever.  It was going to be very  expensive, because it cost money  to house and feed them. 

 Their life cycle is long, so it  would be a very lengthy  experiment.  And because the cost was such,  you always had to work with  small numbers of animals.  You could never do an experiment  where statistically, you had  enough samples to really trust.  So he said, let's go to work on  some smaller animal, the white  rat is what he chose, that had  all these properties.  There's a story in one of his  papers.  Actually, I guess it's in his  autobiography.  It says he went to the Dean of  the Ag School to propose this,  and the Dean threw him out of  his office, saying that if the  farmers of the state ever got  wind of the fact that we were  spending their money to learn  how to nourish rats, they'd run  us out of town on a rail.  So, he went back to his mentor,  Babcock, and Babcock and  McCollum together schemed to go  to Chicago, to a pet store, and  buy a couple of sets of mating  domesticated rats.  And they became, in fact, the  parents of all of the  experimental rats used all over  the world for a long time.  Madison had the two largest rat  farms in the world, on the near  west side, which is now a  high-rent district. 

 So, the experiments that went on  from now on could involve more  animals and could be done in  such a way that you really could  get straight answers.  (inaudible)  Yes, it's called Harlan Heights.  It used to be  Harlan Sprague Dawley Rats.  So, the rest, I say was history.  There was a new paradigm.  There was a way to do biological  assays to see if something was  good or not as a nutrient.  And what you did after that, was  you tried to figure out ways to  separate the components of good  food into separable fractions,  and see which fraction contained  the good stuff.  McCollum very quickly discovered  that you could fractionate  butter into so-called  fat-soluble stuff, which is  soluble in organic solvents,  and the water-soluble stuff.  And he called the fat-soluble  Vitamin A, and the water-soluble  Vitamin B.  Vitamin B turned out to be a  mixture of a number of vitamins. 

 Vitamin A turned out to be a  mixture of five vitamins.  McCollum then chose to study one  of those, one we now call  Vitamin A, whereas others in the  department, Steenbock, Elvehjem,  Hart and others later, studied  the other vitamins, many of them  water-soluble.  Hart also realized that there  was stuff in food that survived  the roughest kind of chemical  treatment, that is, if you  converted the food into entirely  ash, so there were no organic  compounds left, it was still  valuable as a nutrient.  So there was something in there,  which of course, we now  recognize to be minerals, like  phosphate, sodium, chloride, and  so on.  So eventually, McCollum purified  and characterized the Vitamin A.  Steenbock discovered a way to  produce Vitamin D very  inexpensively, as I'll show you  shortly.  Elvehjem and Strong discovered  the compound niacin to be a  water-soluble vitamin, that  entirely cured the terrible  disease, terrible then in  prisons and orphanages  especially, of pellagra.  It cured it in a shot, like  that.  Snell, another faculty member  who is not on the original list,  because he came along later,  worked on Vitamin B-6.  These people, together, looked  at vitamins C, K, and E. 

 And Elvehjem, Steenbock, Hart,  Hoekstra, looked at minerals  copper, iron, zinc, iodine, and  so on.  So there was a tremendous  explosion of interest in these  components, and slowly, it  became clear that the inadequate  diet that had been discovered  with this experiment with the  cows, was inadequate in several  ways.  It wasn't just lacking one  thing, it was lacking a number  of things.  And when they finally added it  up, it was quite a list.  So here are just a few of the  plaques that commemorate these  findings.  Hart set the stage.  I should say, by the way, that  Babcock planned the experiment,  and had the whole idea in his  mind.  But he never put his name on it.  The paper didn't have his name  on it.  Hart organized the workers and  made this happen, so he surely  deserved equal credit for this. 

 But this says that the original  experiment pointed out the  likely existence of vitamins and  trace minerals.  McCollum discovered  Vitamins A and what he called  water-soluble B.  There were others around the  world, who at the same time,  were doing the same thing, so  there was a race.  Steenbock discovered that the  Vitamin D, which was one of the  fat-soluble vitamins, was  curative for the very serious  disease rickets, serious  especially in the northern  climates, including places like  northern Wisconsin, where people  wear clothes most of the year.  It turns out that you need  sunlight to fall on your skin to  make Vitamin D.  And if you don't have that,  then you've got to get it  someplace else.  Steenbock discovered a very easy  way to get at Vitamin D.  He discovered, if you irradiated  food with an ultraviolet lamp,  it produced Vitamin D in the  product.  And it worked out to be very  effective in irradiated milk.  So, Steenbock was able to  develop a method that solved  completely the very serious  problem of rickets, by simply  irradiating milk, or adding  irradiated foods to milk to cure  that disease. 

 There was a disease in pigs,  in which the pigs were born  hairless and had something  called "the thumps,"  a behavioral problem.  And it turned out that they were  anemic.  Their red blood cell count was  low, and they were sick because  of that.  Then a thorough investigation of  that by the Wisconsin group,  including Elvehjem, and Hart,  and Steenbock, showed that the  problem was that these pigs  needed to have both iron and  copper provided in their diet.  If they didn't have enough, then  they would be sick.  And it turned out that this was  also true of humans, for the  same reasons, and that this  resulted in the cure of several  kinds of human anemias, as well.  There was, at the time, at the  turn of the 20th century, a  serious problem in the whole  central part of the United  States called goiter.  It was an enlargement of the  gland, the thyroid gland.  It's normally this size and sits  alongside the trachea.  In patients with goiter, this  gland enlarges, and sometimes it  enlarges quite a bit. 

 And it turns out that the only  problem responsible for this  grotesque situation is that  these people didn't get enough  iodine in their diets.  If you put just a whiff of  iodine in their diet, that  completely cures the disease  goiter.  And as you probably have  noticed, from early times, early  in the 20th century, until the  present, the way that iodine was  delivered to patients, to people  in general, was to put just a  little bit of iodine into the  table salt that we all use.  And that was sufficient to  completely cure the disease  goiter.  Here are Conrad Elvehjem and  Frank Strong.  Strong was still here when I  came in '71, so I got to know  him.  Elvehjem was gone by that time.  But Elvehjem was the teacher and  Strong was the student.  They worked together on this  disease, pellagra, which as it  turned out was a nutritional  disease that occurred mostly in  people who lived in orphanages  or prisons, and who therefore  didn't get a very varied  or very good diet.  It turned out there was  something missing in their diet. 

 That something was identified by  Elvehjem and Strong as the  vitamin niacin.  And instantly, the disease was  cured.  Niacin was cheap and easy to  make by the ton.  And it was therefore, after this  time, no excuse for anybody  anywhere to ever suffer again  from pellagra.  Well, that's interesting.  I was going to show you a  picture, but Quicktime needs a  decompressor.  The picture I wanted to show you  is one that I hope some of you  will see sometime.  In the old Biochemistry  building, there's a mural by  John Steuart Curry, who was the  artist in residence in Madison  for a period, 1940-44.  He painted a mural called "The  Social Benefits of Biochemical  Research," in which he showed  from left to right, ill animals,  and ill children, and ill  people, and on the right,  healthy ones.  And this was his way of  representing the social benefits  of research. 

 When we now look at a bottle of  vitamins, what we see is all  these things, Vitamin A,  Vitamin C, D-3, E.  And as I looked at this last  night, I realized there's hardly  a vitamin on this, or a mineral  down here, that wasn't worked on  at Madison.  Almost all of these had their  early history in Madison.  So, we have now, simply, you can  take a pill to essentially make  sure that you won't suffer from  any of the deficiencies that  used to be very common in poor  diet times.  Now, I wanted to give you some  feeling for just how famous and  how well regarded Babcock was  during this time.  So I'll read to you here from  McCollum.  McCollum was the student who  worked with Babcock.  In McCollum's own autobiography,  he was talking about how in  Babcock's later life, he'd  become sort of a senior  scientist and a diplomat for the  university.  "In time, I learned that he was  the most important man in  Wisconsin as far as the entire  University was concerned.  He had taught agricultural  chemistry to farm boys for 35  years. 

 He was recognized by his  students as a superior man who  was not only well informed and a  capable teacher, but an original  thinker.  He had invented a simple and  accurate mechanical test for  determining the fat content..."  This also, by the way,  reads that he,  in the student-teacher  relationship, had set up the  Farm Short Course, which became  a feature of Wisconsin's Ag  School, and has remained so  since.  Babcock was so famous, he even  got a hollyhock named after him.  This is him in his old age.  He lived in a house on Lake  Street.  And I think it was the house  that used to be across from  McDonald's on Lake Street, that  housed Student Services.  If you wanted to rent a place in  Madison, you could go there and  look.  In any case, that's Babcock in  his old age.  He even was the object of an  article that gave him credit for  being a human being, which  scientists are not used to.  Now, here's Harry Steenbock. 

 I want to, in the next few  minutes, show you what the  sequel to all this was.  Steenbock went on to study  Vitamin D.  When Babcock had developed the  Babcock test, which was of great  commercial value, he decided he  wouldn't patent it.  And he was criticized for this,  because it certainly would've  been a very lucrative patent,  and might have brought money in  that could've been used for  science.  But he insisted that this was  for the public, and didn't want  the money.  When Steenbock discovered that  you could irradiate milk and  thereby produce a good Vitamin D  source, he immediately was  approached by food companies who  wanted to buy the rights to use  this in their foods.  And he declined to sell it to  them, but instead got together a  group of a few Wisconsin Alumni,  each of whom kicked in a few  dollars to hire a lawyer.  And they set up a foundation,  which became the Wisconsin  Alumni Research Foundation,  WARF.  And that foundation at first  helped to get the patents on the  process of Vitamin D formation  by irradiation, and then handled  the proceeds, the money that  came in from this very lucrative  patent.  The terms of the original  foundation said that the money  earned this way had to all be  spent in research at the  university. 

 So for all these years, since  Steenbock first established  WARF, the university has  profited enormously from very  large amounts of money that  flowed in, from his patents  first, and for many other  patents since.  He, himself, who lived frugally  and became a rich man.  And he, when he died, endowed  the Wisconsin Academy.  He endowed several libraries,  including the life sciences  library on the campus, the  Steenbock Library.  He provided money to a few  things like the Steenbock  Symposium, which this summer was  a symposium in honor of Gobind  Khorana, one of our local Nobel  Prize winners.  But he gave money for the  Steenbock Lectures.  His a picture of Paul Boyer, a  graduate of the University of  Wisconsin that went on to win  the Nobel Prize.  We have a lecture in his name  every year.  And perhaps his best gift to the  university was Hector DeLuca,  one of his last students, who  has continued Steenbock's work  until the present, and has  produced over the years, a  number of compounds that are  used medicinally, the treatment  of diseases that affect bone  metabolism, calcium and  phosphate metabolism.  So he had a huge impact on the  university. 

 Elvehjem became the Chairman of  the Biochemistry Department.  He then became Dean of the  Graduate School, and eventually  the President of the University  of Wisconsin, and he died in  that office.  The Elvehjem Museum, of course,  was named for him.  He trained a prodigious 88 PhDs.  I can't imagine how one man  could do this.  But those PhDs included some  very prominent people.  Van Potter went on to be a very  famous and important member of  the faculty at Wisconsin.  Harry Waisman, whose name is  attached to the Waisman Center,  the center for research and  treatment of children with  developmental disorders.  Milt Sunde was the chairman  of a department on campus.  Alf Harper was a chairman  of the Nutrition Department. 

 So Elvehjem produced not only an  enormous amount of work on the  B vitamins, but also peopled the  country with students who went  on to carry out his work.  McCollum didn't stay at Madison  very long.  He was here from 1907-1917.  But when he left here, he went  to an interesting position.  Everything I've told you so far  has been about agriculture, and  I told you the department here  was originally called  Agricultural Chemistry.  It became Biochemistry in  Elvehjem's time.  But when McCollum went to Johns  Hopkins from here, he didn't go  to an ag school, he went to a  medical school.  This was sort of a remarkable  change, which meant that now the  information that he had been  developing with studies of  animals about what was important  in nutrition, came to be applied  to humans.  And McCollum went on to do  wonderful work, write several  important textbooks on  nutrition, found an institute  called the McCollum Pratt  Institute there.  He came to be called  Dr. Vitamin. 

 And he actually was a tremendous  asset to the Johns Hopkins   Medical School, and was one of  the people who made it famous in  that period.  There was, during this period,  1909 or 1910 to 1930, an author,  Paul deKruif.  Do any of you know about him,  about anything he's written?  He wrote sort of breathless  prose about science.  And one of his books was called  "The Hunger Fighters," and it  largely featured Babcock  and Hart.  Here's a little quotation  to give you an idea  of the kind of writer he was.  "There is a kind of hunger  other than the hunger of the  face gaunt for lack of food, of  the lean belly hurting for want  of something to fill it.  There is the hidden hunger that  lets folks starve to death while  they are eating plenty.  Babcock of Wisconsin was the  first of all modern men to find  this hunger that doesn't gnaw at  man and beast,  but only strikes them down..."  And he goes on, and you can get  a feeling for the kind of prose  he uses.  But he carried on extensive  correspondence with Hart in the  writing of this book.  And that correspondence still  exists. 

 I spent some days going through  it a few days ago.  And it was remarkable to me,  that in all of his  correspondence with deKruif,  Hart invariably played down his  role, and said it was really  nothing, it was the young guys  who did it.  But looking at the experiments  themselves, it's very clear that  Hart was the brains and the  driving force behind them.  So we have that remarkable case  of a modest professor.  Now, some of you may have heard  the talk or seen the newspaper  accounts of Michael Pollan who  was here just a few days ago to  give a lecture.  His book, "In Defense of Food,"  has been chosen by the  university as one of those that  everybody will read, so we can  all talk about it in common.  And he's a very serious critic  of much of what I've been  telling you about today.  The criticism is less direct  than you might suppose by the  words here.  But his idea is that for as long  as you are doctoring up food to  put back nutrients into it,  you're turning it into something  that isn't really food, and we'd  all be better off if we went  back to real food that hadn't  been doctored.  He calls the rise of  nutritionism a bad development. 

 And I thought it would have been  really very interesting to have  Michael Pollan on one side of  the stage and EB Hart on the  other to talk about this,  because they had both invested  a lot in these ideas.  And I think they would've  probably reached the same  conclusion, after a long  conversation, which is that the  work that went on here and  elsewhere to discover the  vitamins was absolutely  essential.  The paradigm that was followed,  that is, feeding an animal the  bare minimum diet and then  supplementing it to see what  works, was the only way a  scientist could do a biological  assay.  And the motive for these studies  here in the early 1900s was to  give agriculture a firmer  financial basis.  So the idea was to figure out,  what's the least expensive food  I can serve my animals and still  get good quality meat and milk  from them.  Whereas, of course, in the  evaluation of a human diet,  there are other factors, which  to Michael Pollan, are very  important factors.  And they don't necessarily have  a financial bottom line.  There are other reasons why we  eat, than to make milk and  wheat.  So, with that, I'll close and  invite any questions you may  have about any of this.  And if you wish, I'd be happy  to supply you with a set of  references that account for much  of what I've told you today.