The Great Starvation Experiment: Ancel Keys and the Men Who Starved for Science (review)

"Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital, Willowbrook and Tuskegee." These are the names of the bioethics trinity of research studies that all easily tumble off the lips of medical historians to explain unethical medical research done by "good scientists," and requiring the move toward human subject protection. Far less is known about the University of Minnesota's 1944-45 human semi-starvation/rehabilitation experiment with 36 World War II conscientious objectors. Already doing alternative service, the men "volunteered" to have their calories cut to 1,560 a day for six months and to eat a diet typical of Europeans caught under wartime conditions, as they lost nearly 25 percent of their body weight before being rehabbed.

Tucker's book is a swashbuckling tale of the muscular military/cold war science experiment led by the tough-minded Ancel Keys and its effect on the pacifist men who tried to prove their masculinity and patriotism through agreeing to starve themselves. Relying upon interviews, memoirs, Key's own massive report of the project, and some secondary materials, Tucker builds a drama told primarily in the present tense (complete with dialogues) that is long on "you were there" narrative from the perspectives of the researchers and subjects, yet is short on analysis.

Keys is perhaps best known as the father of K-rations used by the military under combat conditions and the 1950s international epidemiology that linked fatty food to cholesterol and heart attacks. A polymath with two Ph.D.'s, one in biology and another earned somewhat quickly in physiology, Keys appears to be a character sent from a Teddy Roosevelt central casting studio (in part because he was silent acting star Lon Cheney's nephew) to play the leader of cold-hearted science as head of Minnesota's Laboratory of Physiological Hygiene. On the way to Minnesota, Keys lived for a summer collecting guano in a bat cave, shipped off as a crewman on a slow boat to China, and mined and lumbered. His willingness to have his own arterial blood drawn on a Chilean peak 17,500 feet above sea level left him with a major record for such a feat. It also gained him notoriety for ruthlessness for decking another researcher who questioned his procedures. You can just imagine the movie.

Keys used his contacts with the military to gain support for a formal experiment on the science of starvation. He thought he had a chance to answer a major human problem: to understand what happened under starvation, and then to measure what was needed to bring human beings back to their normal weights. The military bought and paid for his research and funds came forward from such diverse additional sources as the Sugar Research Foundation, the university's Athletic Department, and the Historic Peace Churches (Mennonites, Quakers, and Brethren) whose members made up some of the pacifist volunteers. The men for the experiment were recruited from the Civilian Public Service, the alternative program for pacifists drafted during the war, and given a sense of doing a real and dangerous job for their country. Promised a chance to escape their work in mental hospitals and lumber camps, many of them were induced with enticements such as their proximity to the women's dorms at Minnesota and the chance to take classes. While they lived, were measured, charted, and assessed in a rabbit warren under the football stadium, they were also allowed on the campus and around the town (although evidence of cheating once the starvation system began led to a buddy system that limited their adventures).

Tucker shapes the book with the stories of the men themselves, beginning with the harrowing tale of Subject Number 20, who, during the recovery period, took an axe to his hand while chopping wood and took off three fingers. By the end of the book, Number 20 morphs into Sam Legg, a powerful man who went...