Latest / Revisionist History / The Rise of the Guinea Pigs

Transcript

The Rise of the Guinea Pigs · Revisionist History

0:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin.
0:20
Speaker 2: One of my favorite podcasts is called This Week in
0:24
Speaker 2: Virology TWIV, as it's known.
0:27
Speaker 3: This Week in Virology, the podcast about viruses, the kind
0:33
Speaker 3: that make you sick.
0:38
Speaker 2: On the show, a prominent virologist named Vincent Racaniello has
0:42
Speaker 2: a weekly chat with colleagues from around the country, updating
0:46
Speaker 2: their listeners on the latest news from around the world
0:49
Speaker 2: about microbes. TWIV is a very big deal. It's the
0:54
Speaker 2: tonight show only for virologists. For my birthday, my friend
0:58
Speaker 2: Charles got me a twift shirt, which I'm wearing right now.
1:02
Speaker 2: TWIF has taught me more about science than almost anything
1:05
Speaker 2: I can remember, and one of their most memorable episodes
1:08
Speaker 2: is called I Love the Smell of Vaccines in the Morning.
1:12
Speaker 3: Many people sent this to us asking our thoughts, and
1:17
Speaker 3: so there you go, We're going to give you our thoughts.
1:20
Speaker 2: I Love the Smell of Vaccines in the Morning came
1:22
Speaker 2: out in the winter of twenty twenty two. The Twivers
1:26
Speaker 2: wanted to talk about a study that had just been
1:28
Speaker 2: published entitled Safety, Tolerability and Viral Kinetics during tsar's COVID
1:34
Speaker 2: two Human Challenge.
1:36
Speaker 4: This is a.
1:36
Speaker 3: Study where you deliberately infect human volunteers under very carefully
1:42
Speaker 3: controlled conditions. They're under hospital care, they're isolated. Right, You've
1:47
Speaker 3: got anti virals and monoclonals at the ready should anything happen.
1:56
Speaker 2: The Human Challenge trial had thirty six unvaccinated subjects, all
2:00
Speaker 2: between the ages of eighteen and twenty nine, all volunteers
2:05
Speaker 2: who agree to be infected with COVID in a concentrated
2:08
Speaker 2: dose administered to the nasal cavity. The aim of the
2:11
Speaker 2: study was to figure out a crucial bit of information
2:15
Speaker 2: that was still unknown in the early days of the pandemic.
2:19
Speaker 2: How large a dose of covid do you have to
2:21
Speaker 2: be exposed to before you get infected.
2:26
Speaker 3: Sars kov two is not without risk. I mean it's
2:28
Speaker 3: not a bolah, right, but it's not common cold either.
2:33
Speaker 2: The TWIF crew went on for close to two hours
2:35
Speaker 2: about the study, comb through every detail, went on fascinating digressions,
2:40
Speaker 2: looked for insights and inconsistencies, and all came to the
2:44
Speaker 2: same conclusion.
2:45
Speaker 3: I would love to have been privy to the discussions
2:48
Speaker 3: that led up to the approval of this to see
2:50
Speaker 3: what they're thinking, right, Yeah, because I have to say
2:55
Speaker 3: I wouldn't be in favor of this because if one
2:57
Speaker 3: person dies, that's the end of it, and that person's
3:01
Speaker 3: family is pretty upset.
3:03
Speaker 1: Pretty upset, I would say, very upset. It's difficult because
3:07
Speaker 1: when you look at the paper and you see results, okay,
3:10
Speaker 1: and nobody died, nobody even got really sick, I mean
3:13
Speaker 1: really sick. Okay, when you look at it from that
3:17
Speaker 1: point of view, you go, oh wow, this is great.
3:23
Speaker 2: My name is Malcolm Golbwell, you're listening to Revisionist History,
3:27
Speaker 2: my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This is part
3:32
Speaker 2: two of our examination of the Minnesota starvation experiment. Part
3:37
Speaker 2: one was about what happened when ansel keyes invited a
3:40
Speaker 2: group of young men to spend a year in a
3:42
Speaker 2: dingy set of rooms under the University of Minnesota football stadium.
3:51
Speaker 2: This episode is about the strange way that so many
3:55
Speaker 2: scientists think about the morality of human experiments, like, for example,
4:01
Speaker 2: the experiment described in the twelve episode I Love the
4:05
Speaker 2: Smell of Vaccines in the morning. When the crew at
4:15
Speaker 2: This Week in Virology start talking about the experiment, they
4:18
Speaker 2: sound reasonable.
4:20
Speaker 1: There was very careful consideration given by the authors and
4:24
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of other people as to whether they
4:28
Speaker 1: turned it ethical. So no matter what we might think, okay,
4:32
Speaker 1: there are a whole bunch of people who thought that
4:35
Speaker 1: this was just fine.
4:36
Speaker 2: That's Rich Condent of the University of Florida, another of
4:40
Speaker 2: the twive mainstays. Medicine is typically in the business of
4:44
Speaker 2: trying to make sick people healthy, but there's no question
4:47
Speaker 2: that you can learn more by making healthy people sick.
4:50
Speaker 2: Making healthy people sick means you can study your disease
4:53
Speaker 2: from the very beginning, as opposed to the point where
4:56
Speaker 2: the patient shows up in your office. It means you
4:58
Speaker 2: can choose exactly the kind of disease you want to study,
5:02
Speaker 2: the precise strain of virus, the exact species of bacteria.
5:06
Speaker 2: You can choose who you want to study, young people,
5:09
Speaker 2: old people, world class marathoners, the thin, the overweight. You
5:13
Speaker 2: can compare different treatments easily and cheaply. But when you
5:17
Speaker 2: go from healthy to sick, you have a big ethical problem.
5:21
Speaker 2: The hippocratic oath all physicians take says first, do no harm.
5:26
Speaker 2: So how can you justify infecting healthy people with a
5:30
Speaker 2: potentially deadly virus.
5:32
Speaker 1: If I were confronted personally with whether or not to
5:36
Speaker 1: launch or support this study, I'm not sure I would
5:41
Speaker 1: do it.
5:42
Speaker 2: Then Brian Barker, a virologist at Drew University, chimed.
5:45
Speaker 5: In, Yeah, I was trying to imagine if I was
5:48
Speaker 5: in this age group, would I.
5:50
Speaker 6: Be interested in being in the study.
5:52
Speaker 4: And my answer was absolutely not.
5:56
Speaker 2: The more they talked about it, the more adamant the
5:59
Speaker 2: Twig crew became.
6:00
Speaker 3: I would not have approved this. If I were on
6:02
Speaker 3: the committee, I would have voted no. At some point,
6:05
Speaker 3: there's going to be a young person who seems perfectly healthy.
6:09
Speaker 3: There's got something we don't know about and is going
6:11
Speaker 3: to die here. And that's what I'm concerned about. And
6:14
Speaker 3: I don't know how. I'm sure these people don't know
6:17
Speaker 3: anything we don't know, all right. I don't know how
6:20
Speaker 3: they can sleep at night.
6:25
Speaker 2: Now, why are we spending so much time on the
6:27
Speaker 2: issue that Twivers had with this obscure COVID study, Because
6:32
Speaker 2: the Minnesota starvation experiment was exactly the same kind of
6:36
Speaker 2: human challenge trial ancil Keys took thirty six perfectly healthy
6:41
Speaker 2: young men and made them sick by starving them for months.
6:46
Speaker 2: A study like that should raise a million red flags, right.
6:54
Speaker 2: The Minnesota starvation experiment ran during the final year of
6:57
Speaker 2: the Second World War, and the subjects were all drawn
7:01
Speaker 2: from the pool of men who had refused military service
7:04
Speaker 2: conscientious objectors. They were about seventy two thousand and registered
7:10
Speaker 2: conscientious objectors in the United States during the Second World War.
7:15
Speaker 2: Some served in the military in non combat roles. Others
7:19
Speaker 2: chose alternative service and were put to work fighting forest
7:22
Speaker 2: fires or staffing hospitals.
7:27
Speaker 7: They did social work in the Deep South. They worked
7:31
Speaker 7: as orderlies in state mental health facilities. Many of them
7:35
Speaker 7: were digging ditches and grading roads and doing things that
7:39
Speaker 7: simply couldn't be defined as work of national importance.
7:43
Speaker 2: That's the historian Sarah Tracy who's been researching the Minnesota
7:47
Speaker 2: starvation experiment.
7:48
Speaker 7: Conscientious Objectors had been used as medical guinea pigs, and
7:53
Speaker 7: the US Civilian Public Service and Selective Service learn about this,
7:59
Speaker 7: and so there is this program that about seven hundred
8:03
Speaker 7: of the twelve thousand conscientious objectors who were doing work
8:08
Speaker 7: of national and importance, so called work of the national importance,
8:12
Speaker 7: about seven hundred of them enroll in medical experiments all
8:17
Speaker 7: around the country.
8:18
Speaker 2: Among the researchers who used human guinea pigs was ansel Keys.
8:22
Speaker 2: He's testing the effects of thiamine deficiency and needs willing
8:26
Speaker 2: to test subjects for a long term study in his lab.
8:30
Speaker 2: Why not these religious pacifists.
8:32
Speaker 7: He writes away, and he gets several about eleven to
8:36
Speaker 7: do vitamin experiments, and that goes very well. He's impressed
8:42
Speaker 7: by these conscientious objectors. They're dedicated, they're committed, they're excellent
8:48
Speaker 7: research subjects.
8:50
Speaker 2: It's from this pool of volunteers that Keys draws the
8:53
Speaker 2: first of the subjects for his starvation experiment. Now, if
8:58
Speaker 2: you want to make healthy people sick, you have to
9:01
Speaker 2: be completely sure that your subjects are acting autonomously, to
9:05
Speaker 2: use the word favored by ethicists, meaning did the subjects
9:09
Speaker 2: make their decision to join the experiment freely, without pressure
9:13
Speaker 2: or constraint. Were they informed of all the consequences? Did
9:17
Speaker 2: they fully understand what they were getting into? The NYU
9:21
Speaker 2: bioethicist Art Kaplan says, it's hard for scientists now to
9:24
Speaker 2: find an easy answer to those questions when it comes
9:27
Speaker 2: to the starvation experiment.
9:29
Speaker 8: Bioethicists like me have tended not to comment much on
9:33
Speaker 8: this study. It's interesting, this is such a difficult case
9:37
Speaker 8: that I think people they've steered away from it a
9:40
Speaker 8: little bit.
9:42
Speaker 2: What makes the case so difficult is a keys of
9:45
Speaker 2: study was conducted in the middle of a world war.
9:49
Speaker 2: His subjects were all men who would refuse to fight
9:52
Speaker 2: Nazis in Europe, and because of that they were subject
9:55
Speaker 2: to intense social pressure. People called them cowards, shirkers, morally bankrupt.
10:00
Speaker 2: Doors were slammed in their faces. And so along comes
10:04
Speaker 2: Ansel Keys, charismatic ansel Keys, Ansel Keys with a two
10:08
Speaker 2: hundred point IQ score, and he says, would you like
10:11
Speaker 2: to be part of a medical experiment that makes a
10:14
Speaker 2: difference that erases the sin of your absence from the war? Well,
10:19
Speaker 2: of course they're going to say yes. So is that
10:22
Speaker 2: an autonomous decision or is that a coerce decision? In
10:31
Speaker 2: the previous episode, we heard how one of the volunteers,
10:35
Speaker 2: Sam Legg, chopped off some of his fingers with an
10:37
Speaker 2: axe in the delirium of his starvation. And then as
10:41
Speaker 2: he lay in his hospital bed, leg begged Ansel Keys
10:45
Speaker 2: to let him stay in study. Remember what he told Keys, doctor,
10:51
Speaker 2: for the rest of my life people are going to
10:53
Speaker 2: ask me what I did during the war. This experiment
10:57
Speaker 2: is my chance to give an honorable answer to that. Question.
11:01
Speaker 2: That does not sound like a rational, autonomous decision. That
11:05
Speaker 2: sounds like someone who's terrified to go back to his
11:07
Speaker 2: hometown and tell I'm sorry, I've now failed my country twice.
11:14
Speaker 2: As for the second test of autonomy, did the subjects
11:17
Speaker 2: know what they were getting into? Did they fully understand
11:19
Speaker 2: the consequences of their participation? Of course not. That's the
11:24
Speaker 2: whole lesson of the testimony from the eighteen volunteers in
11:27
Speaker 2: the Library of Congress. They thought they would be hungry.
11:30
Speaker 2: They didn't understand that starvation could cause him to start
11:33
Speaker 2: losing their moral bearings. Sam Legg remembered one day when
11:38
Speaker 2: he was out walking and saw a boy whiz by
11:40
Speaker 2: on his bicycle.
11:41
Speaker 9: How very brief I hope it was brief moment I
11:45
Speaker 9: suddenly hated that that boy, and that I hate at
11:51
Speaker 9: this point to tell you this, because it doesn't speak
11:56
Speaker 9: very well for me.
11:58
Speaker 2: Legg was a committed pacifist, a deeply spiritual man. Did
12:02
Speaker 2: he consent to that feeling when he signed up? He's
12:04
Speaker 2: still ashamed of it half a century later.
12:18
Speaker 4: Frankly, I was amazed or shocked by the study.
12:26
Speaker 2: That's so hard. Letterman, a bioethicist who teaches at the
12:29
Speaker 2: Rohmbam Medical Campus in Israel, and it's one of the
12:32
Speaker 2: few people in his field to have written about the
12:34
Speaker 2: Minnesota starvation experiment. Letterman's big problem is with the notion
12:38
Speaker 2: that the subjects quote unquote volunteered.
12:41
Speaker 4: We served is ready serving the army as well. And
12:44
Speaker 4: we have a joke about volunteering for something. You don't
12:48
Speaker 4: volunteer in the army, you get volunteered, right, And we
12:52
Speaker 4: even have a special ward for it in Himbrew.
12:54
Speaker 2: Only in Israel is there a special word to describe
12:58
Speaker 2: the condition of volunteering without actually volunteering being volunteered.
13:03
Speaker 4: So I suspect that in that environment. And again I'm not,
13:07
Speaker 4: you know, not an historian. They don't know what it
13:10
Speaker 4: was like during that time in the early forties in
13:13
Speaker 4: the US. But I think we need to be worthy
13:17
Speaker 4: of any assumption of voluntariness in that context.
13:23
Speaker 2: Letterman's point is, if an experiment isn't truly voluntary, how
13:27
Speaker 2: do we justify making the subjects suffer?
13:29
Speaker 4: If it's minimal harm, you give them diarrhea. I mean,
13:34
Speaker 4: you can say, okay, that's fine, that's nothing, But if
13:36
Speaker 4: that means that they start chewing gums, showing a bubble
13:42
Speaker 4: gum all day long, or cutting off their fingers, or
13:46
Speaker 4: developing neurosis or developing kidney failure, or two people developed
13:51
Speaker 4: kidney failure because of the study. I think at that
13:54
Speaker 4: point you should say, no, that's enough. Regardless of the
13:59
Speaker 4: potential benefits. There are some things we cannot do.
14:03
Speaker 2: There are some things we cannot do. This is exactly
14:07
Speaker 2: where the Twitters ended up as well in their discussion
14:10
Speaker 2: of the COVID infection study. Remember what Vincent Racanello said.
14:15
Speaker 3: I'm sure these people don't know anything. We don't know,
14:18
Speaker 3: all right. I don't know how they can sleep at night.
14:24
Speaker 10: Now.
14:25
Speaker 2: Am I happy that scientists cared deeply about the ethical
14:28
Speaker 2: implications of their field, of course, But there's something I
14:31
Speaker 2: don't quite understand about the arguments used by those who
14:35
Speaker 2: worry about human jallenge trials. Listen to this exchange, for example,
14:39
Speaker 2: the twive crew are digging deeper and deeper into the
14:42
Speaker 2: details of the COVID infection experiment and which condit starts,
14:46
Speaker 2: reading to the fine print on the studies design.
14:50
Speaker 1: I thought it was interesting that they apparently started out
14:53
Speaker 1: by soliciting volunteers with an online application and got twenty
15:01
Speaker 1: seven thousand responses.
15:03
Speaker 2: Wait, the people who ran that study didn't have to
15:07
Speaker 2: trick people to get them to side, or go to
15:10
Speaker 2: some out of the way prison and use inmates as
15:13
Speaker 2: guinea pigs. No, twenty seven thousand people looked around them
15:18
Speaker 2: at the millions of people dying from COVID and said,
15:21
Speaker 2: I'm willing to take that risk, to make that sacrifice
15:24
Speaker 2: for society. There was a line out the door, down
15:27
Speaker 2: the block and clear across town.
15:29
Speaker 11: They were coming to us saying, we're in the middle
15:32
Speaker 11: of a pandemic.
15:33
Speaker 2: I called up Andrew Catchpull, the British virologist who led
15:37
Speaker 2: the COVID infection study.
15:38
Speaker 11: They came to us with phrases like they just wanted
15:41
Speaker 11: to do their bit for the pandemic. They felt that
15:43
Speaker 11: this was something that they could do to help. So
15:47
Speaker 11: it was really heart warming actually to see that.
15:50
Speaker 2: Now, you would think that if you were a virologist
15:52
Speaker 2: on the biggest virology podcast in the world trying to
15:55
Speaker 2: figure out the ethics of a particular study, then this
15:59
Speaker 2: kind of information would matter. That if you're worrying about consent,
16:04
Speaker 2: then that kind of overwhelming enthusiasm should maybe make you
16:08
Speaker 2: a little less worried. So, like any loyal Twive listener,
16:12
Speaker 2: I waited for the rest of the crew to start
16:14
Speaker 2: talking about the implications of the twenty seven thousand volunteers.
16:18
Speaker 2: I waited and waited for the Twivers to make sense
16:22
Speaker 2: of this and crickets. The conversation just moved on.
16:29
Speaker 1: All right.
16:30
Speaker 3: So after the screening, they're admitted to individual negative pressure
16:35
Speaker 3: rooms in a quarantine unit twenty four hour monitoring their
16:39
Speaker 3: screen for other respiratory infections using what's bulderbio.
16:42
Speaker 2: Vincent Racanello might as well admit a big w with
16:45
Speaker 2: his fingers. Whatever, the fact that twenty seven thousand people
16:51
Speaker 2: signed up to get infected with COVID has apparently made
16:55
Speaker 2: no impression at all on these virologists. Human challenge trials
17:00
Speaker 2: are a problem to scientists. Let me read to you
17:10
Speaker 2: from a paper that appeared early in the pandemic in
17:13
Speaker 2: p and As Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
17:18
Speaker 2: which is about as prestigious as scientific journals get. The
17:21
Speaker 2: paper was written by a group of America's leading medical ethicists.
17:26
Speaker 2: They're talking about the same general question that was discussed
17:29
Speaker 2: on the TWIB episode. Should people be allowed to volunteer
17:34
Speaker 2: to be deliberately infected with COVID. In this case, they're
17:37
Speaker 2: talking about deliberate infection for testing potential COVID vaccines. They
17:42
Speaker 2: give you the experimental vaccine, then they expose you to
17:45
Speaker 2: COVID to see if it works, and the risk, of
17:47
Speaker 2: course is that if it doesn't work, you'll get sick. Now,
17:51
Speaker 2: if you volunteer to be a COVID guinea pig in
17:54
Speaker 2: an experiment like that, I'm assuming you understand what you're
17:57
Speaker 2: getting into. But the famous ethicists, in their paper in
18:01
Speaker 2: the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences begged to differ.
18:06
Speaker 2: Here's what they wrote. Despite acknowledge in consent forms that
18:11
Speaker 2: participants may not experience direct benefits from the experimental intervention,
18:16
Speaker 2: it is entirely possible that volunteers may labor under a
18:20
Speaker 2: quote preventive misconception that they will receive some protection from
18:25
Speaker 2: infection by their participation. That's a lot of gobbletgook. So
18:30
Speaker 2: let me translate for you. You can tell the guinea
18:33
Speaker 2: pig that this vaccine is experimental, that it hasn't been tested,
18:38
Speaker 2: that we don't know yet whether it works, but there
18:40
Speaker 2: is at least a theoretical possibility that one of those
18:44
Speaker 2: guinea pigs are going to misunderstand what's going on, And
18:47
Speaker 2: the possibility of that misapprehension means that you should never
18:52
Speaker 2: ever try an experiment like that. I'll be honest. When
18:58
Speaker 2: I read that paper, I got a little puzzled. I mean,
19:02
Speaker 2: what would it take to make these bioethesists happy? What
19:05
Speaker 2: if we screened and vetted and sifted and sorted through
19:08
Speaker 2: every one of the people who volunteered, picking out only
19:12
Speaker 2: the select few who we thought really and truly understood
19:15
Speaker 2: what was going on? Would that make them happy? What
19:19
Speaker 2: if we only pick people with graduate degrees, or ones
19:22
Speaker 2: with IQs over one hundred and fifty, or ones willing
19:24
Speaker 2: to run a ten thousand word essay describing exactly what
19:27
Speaker 2: they think they're getting into. Would that make them happy?
19:30
Speaker 2: Or would they still be like? I don't know. I
19:33
Speaker 2: think it's entirely possible that volunteers may labor under a
19:36
Speaker 2: preventative misconception. So even as this pandemic rages all around us,
19:41
Speaker 2: let's not do anything at all. Now, how are they
19:44
Speaker 2: so sure of this? Did they debrief anyone who've been
19:47
Speaker 2: part of a vacting challenge trial. No, they didn't. I
19:51
Speaker 2: want to talk a little bit more about the men
19:53
Speaker 2: who volunteer and their motivations and how we judge them
19:56
Speaker 2: in retrospect. I brought this issue up with the bioethicist
20:00
Speaker 2: Zohar Letterman when we were discussing the Minnesota Starvation Experiment,
20:04
Speaker 2: and I'm wondering, when it comes to assessing the risks
20:07
Speaker 2: and benefits of a study like this, shouldn't what the
20:11
Speaker 2: subjects think matter? You're not interested in subjects.
20:15
Speaker 1: I think.
20:16
Speaker 4: I think in research ethics, as BIOasis, as policy makers,
20:23
Speaker 4: we can only listen to what people want up to
20:27
Speaker 4: a certain point when it comes to unnecessary harms. When
20:34
Speaker 4: it comes to the ethics per se of a certain
20:40
Speaker 4: policy or certain study, there comes a point when you
20:45
Speaker 4: no longer need to listen to the voices, but you
20:48
Speaker 4: just have to go on the ethics of it.
20:52
Speaker 2: Actually, no, I think we should listen to the voces.
21:17
Speaker 2: Eighteen of the surviving members of the starvation experiment left
21:22
Speaker 2: oral histories behind about their experience. On first listen, what's
21:27
Speaker 2: striking about them is what the men went through their pain.
21:31
Speaker 2: But if you listen more closely, you hear something else.
21:36
Speaker 12: Why were you a craciential subjector.
21:40
Speaker 13: Well, because in when I was in high school, I
21:43
Speaker 13: became acquainted with a fellow by the name of Jesus
21:47
Speaker 13: of Nazareth, and I thought he was a pretty good guy,
21:53
Speaker 13: and I liked what he said, and I liked the
21:58
Speaker 13: way he lived and the way he handled situations with
22:03
Speaker 13: other human beings.
22:05
Speaker 9: I couldn't imagine Jesus. I couldn't visualize him in the
22:12
Speaker 9: uniform of a US army or any kind of an army.
22:17
Speaker 9: It just didn't fit. And so I basically said, well,
22:23
Speaker 9: if he couldn't do what, I can't do it.
22:25
Speaker 2: The interviewer asked everyone the same question, why wouldn't you fight?
22:30
Speaker 2: And each man gives a version of the same answer.
22:33
Speaker 12: Why were you a conscientious objector?
22:35
Speaker 14: I'm not going to kill anybody, and I don't want
22:37
Speaker 14: anyone to kill me.
22:39
Speaker 12: God put us on his earth.
22:42
Speaker 14: And as the only one that has a right to
22:44
Speaker 14: take us away.
22:45
Speaker 2: These were not people who dodged the draft out of
22:48
Speaker 2: cowardice or indifference. These were deeply moral people from religious
22:53
Speaker 2: traditions like the Quakers or the Mennonites or the Brethren,
22:56
Speaker 2: that had principled theological objections to war that go back
23:00
Speaker 2: hundreds of years.
23:02
Speaker 5: So you know, on the most basic level, why were
23:05
Speaker 5: you a conscientious objector?
23:07
Speaker 14: Well, I don't believe in killing people under any circumstances.
23:11
Speaker 2: Conscientious objectors had many ways to serve during the war,
23:15
Speaker 2: but it becomes clear listening to their accounts that the
23:17
Speaker 2: issue for them was not what is the easiest or
23:20
Speaker 2: most convenient way to fulfill my wartime obligation. It was
23:24
Speaker 2: what is the most useful way for me to help
23:27
Speaker 2: alleviate human suffering. That's why some of them volunteer to
23:30
Speaker 2: work as research subjects in ansel Keys's lab. They want
23:34
Speaker 2: to do more than dig ditches or work as hospital orderlies.
23:38
Speaker 2: So did they suffer during the starvation experiment? Of course
23:42
Speaker 2: they did, but that doesn't make the experiment immoral. Listen
23:46
Speaker 2: to Sam leg again, the man who chopped off his
23:49
Speaker 2: own fingers in the delirium of malnourishment. Many decades later,
23:53
Speaker 2: this is what he has to say.
23:55
Speaker 9: Everybody else around us is pulling down the world. We
23:57
Speaker 9: want to build it up. We want to be of service.
24:00
Speaker 9: Here was an obvious opportunity for us to be of service.
24:03
Speaker 2: You cannot form a legitimate opinion on the ethics of
24:06
Speaker 2: what happened in Minnesota. Unless you willing to listen to Sandleg.
24:10
Speaker 9: Now immediately you'll say, oh, come on, you are a
24:15
Speaker 9: Jesus freak, which I will agree to. And so you
24:19
Speaker 9: were going to emulate Jesus. How well have you done it?
24:22
Speaker 9: And I say, that's none of your business on this
24:25
Speaker 9: one issue of this aspect of Jesus, I've done it.
24:29
Speaker 9: Never mind the rest, but that stock that was important
24:32
Speaker 9: to me.
24:36
Speaker 2: When ensel Keys retired, he was interviewed by a colleague
24:38
Speaker 2: of his at the University of Minnesota. At one point
24:42
Speaker 2: they talk about the starvation experiment.
24:44
Speaker 14: There's evidence coming all around. At the end of the war,
24:47
Speaker 14: would see a lot of problems and people have been
24:50
Speaker 14: semi starved, especially in northern countries. So I went to
24:55
Speaker 14: the certain general's office and mentioned this, said we ought
25:01
Speaker 14: to get some evidence on it and what happens when
25:05
Speaker 14: people are starved. And then so the network others of him,
25:10
Speaker 14: being an experimentalist, proposed to carry out an experiment, and
25:15
Speaker 14: we've got the authorization to have conscientious objectors.
25:20
Speaker 2: The net result is that I propose that we carry
25:23
Speaker 2: out an experiment, and we got the authorization to have
25:27
Speaker 2: conscientious objectors. Ansel Keys, the Great Genius, wanted the world
25:32
Speaker 2: to know that the starvation experiment was his idea, But
25:37
Speaker 2: like so many other things about that study, the truth
25:40
Speaker 2: is more complicated. It goes back to Ansel Keys's earlier
25:44
Speaker 2: experiments with wartime volunteers, the experiments on vitamins.
25:50
Speaker 7: The conscientious objectors who are working in Keys's lab realize
25:55
Speaker 7: that this is a military experiment, that in fact, what
25:59
Speaker 7: he's doing is testing different rations that will have military applications,
26:04
Speaker 7: and they object to that because it has a military application.
26:08
Speaker 2: Sarah Tracy, the historian writing a biography of Keys. When
26:12
Speaker 2: she was researching her book, she stumbled across correspondence among
26:16
Speaker 2: Keyes's volunteers in the early years of the war. The
26:19
Speaker 2: men were concerned that Keys's work was being funded by
26:22
Speaker 2: the War Department, which made them, in their own eyes,
26:26
Speaker 2: complicit in the war effort.
26:28
Speaker 7: Another idea comes to them, why don't we design our
26:33
Speaker 7: own experiment. We can design an experiment that we want
26:39
Speaker 7: to do that will be of peacetime value, and then
26:46
Speaker 7: we'll get our home churches to pay for it.
26:49
Speaker 2: Oh, I didn't realize that.
26:50
Speaker 7: Nobody's realized that nobody's realized that.
26:57
Speaker 2: Sarah Tracy discovered that we've gotten the origin story of
27:01
Speaker 2: the starvation experiment backwards. Here's what actually happened. A group
27:06
Speaker 2: of volunteers approached the National Service Board religious objectors. They
27:10
Speaker 2: make a proposal. They point out that even if peace
27:14
Speaker 2: breaks out, the war is still going to leave millions
27:16
Speaker 2: of people starving and malnourished. What if we conducted an
27:20
Speaker 2: experiment to figure out how to help them. The Service
27:23
Speaker 2: Board likes the idea and funds it, and the volunteers
27:27
Speaker 2: take that idea and the grant money to answer keys.
27:32
Speaker 7: They wanted to give relief, and if they couldn't go
27:34
Speaker 7: abroad to give relief, then they could use science to
27:37
Speaker 7: determine how that relief should be given.
27:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's so beautiful. And now so they come up
27:44
Speaker 2: with this idea. How do they phrase the idea that
27:48
Speaker 2: we will we will starve our sounds and then see
27:52
Speaker 2: what the best study, the best means of bringing ourselves
27:54
Speaker 2: back to help.
27:55
Speaker 7: Yes, yes, so the people who write the recruitment brochure
27:58
Speaker 7: are the conscientious objectors themselves, the vitamin conscientious objectors. Right,
28:02
Speaker 7: those religious pacifists are doing the lion's share of legwork.
28:08
Speaker 7: When it comes to writing the recruitment brochure?
28:10
Speaker 2: How did you find that out?
28:12
Speaker 7: I found it by going to the Swarthmore College Peace
28:16
Speaker 7: Collection and combing through all their records.
28:20
Speaker 2: The brochure said, will you starve that they may be
28:23
Speaker 2: better fed? With a picture of children overturning their bowls
28:27
Speaker 2: in hopes of finding one last grain of rice.
28:29
Speaker 7: I mean, they arrived in Key's lab and within a
28:33
Speaker 7: month or so they're publishing their own newsletter right called
28:38
Speaker 7: It's Oh, the Guinea Pig Gazette. They published The Guinea
28:41
Speaker 7: Pig Gazette.
28:43
Speaker 2: Okay Keyes published his mammoth report on the Starvation experiment
28:47
Speaker 2: in nineteen fifty years after the war was over, but
28:50
Speaker 2: the volunteers published their findings almost immediately so it could
28:54
Speaker 2: be of use in the chaos after the war ended.
28:57
Speaker 2: A little book called Men in Hunger, a psychological Manual
29:01
Speaker 2: for relief workers. The cover shows a kindly middle aged
29:05
Speaker 2: man shaking the hand of a gaunt European against a
29:08
Speaker 2: blighted landscape. The Minnesota experiment was not something Ansel Keys
29:13
Speaker 2: did to the volunteers. It was something to volunteers chose
29:17
Speaker 2: to do to themselves. Not everyone who suffers as a victim.
29:22
Speaker 2: If we are at the point where we don't understand
29:25
Speaker 2: that fact, where we have a moral vocabulary for victimhood
29:29
Speaker 2: and none for self sacrifice, then God help us.
29:33
Speaker 9: If you could turn the clock back and be back
29:36
Speaker 9: in nineteen in nineteen forties, would you participate in the
29:40
Speaker 9: study again?
29:41
Speaker 12: Yeah, without hesitation.
29:44
Speaker 3: There was a very sign never got event in my life,
29:47
Speaker 3: very much.
29:47
Speaker 15: So if you, if you had to make the decision
29:50
Speaker 15: to participate again or not, what would you do again?
29:54
Speaker 9: I enthusiastically say yes I would, and I think humanity
29:57
Speaker 9: has been improved, and I'm glad I did it.
30:00
Speaker 15: We knew, we knew it wasn't going to be easy.
30:02
Speaker 15: We didn't know how hard it was going to be,
30:03
Speaker 15: but we we knew it was not going to be easy,
30:08
Speaker 15: and we were prepared to suffer, and we suffered. And
30:14
Speaker 15: as far as someone taking advantage of us or mistreating us,
30:20
Speaker 15: absolutely no feelings like that at all, no resentment of
30:23
Speaker 15: any kind.
30:25
Speaker 1: Nothing.
30:26
Speaker 4: And I get that you could turn the clock back,
30:28
Speaker 4: would you participate again?
30:29
Speaker 1: Sure?
30:31
Speaker 5: You bet you.
30:33
Speaker 9: If you could turn the clock back, would you participate
30:35
Speaker 9: in the study again?
30:37
Speaker 2: Yes, I'm very happy that I did. It's one of
30:41
Speaker 2: the things that I'm proud of.
30:44
Speaker 15: Would you do you think you would make the same
30:46
Speaker 15: decision to participate?
30:48
Speaker 8: Yes, I would.
30:51
Speaker 12: No regrets.
31:00
Speaker 2: Next time. On revisions History, the story of one more
31:03
Speaker 2: person who starved for a year so others might be fed.
31:07
Speaker 12: He had a good life, He would say, he had
31:09
Speaker 12: a good life.
31:11
Speaker 2: And what happened to him and his family after that
31:14
Speaker 2: year ended.
31:15
Speaker 12: But he paid a price for what he believed, and
31:18
Speaker 12: he kept paying that price his whole life.
31:30
Speaker 2: Revisionist History is produced by Elwise, Linton Leeman Gestu, and
31:34
Speaker 2: Jacob Smith, with Tolly Emlin and Harrison VJ. Choi. Our
31:38
Speaker 2: editor is Julia Parton. Our executive producer is Miel Label.
31:43
Speaker 2: Original scoring by Luis Kara, mastering by Flon Williams, and
31:46
Speaker 2: engineering by Nina Lawrence. Beth Johnson is our fact checker.
31:51
Speaker 2: Special thanks also to Ariela Markowitz for production help on
31:55
Speaker 2: this episode. I'm Malcolm Glawell.
32:27
Speaker 4: Much about connection. I mean kaenno trigatur.
32:33
Speaker 2: If you target towns and cities, it's as clear as
32:36
Speaker 2: day that there will be civilian victims. In nineteen forty five,
32:42
Speaker 2: the US firebomb Tokyo, destroying a quarter of the city
32:46
Speaker 2: and killing more than one hundred thousand people. I wrote
32:50
Speaker 2: about this infamous bombing campaign in my audiobook The Bomber Mafia,
32:54
Speaker 2: and one of the survivor's voices we Hear is from
32:57
Speaker 2: a project called Paper City. Paper City is now out
33:02
Speaker 2: as a groundbreaking feature documentary director Adrian Francis explores what
33:08
Speaker 2: we choose to remember and hope to forget. To find
33:12
Speaker 2: out more, visit papercityfilm dot com and follow at Paper
33:17
Speaker 2: City Tokyo on social media. Hey Revision's history listeners, I'm
33:26
Speaker 2: capping off this episode with a preview of a new
33:29
Speaker 2: Pushkin show that really has me hooked. It's called Death
33:33
Speaker 2: of an Artist. Death of an Artist has all the
33:35
Speaker 2: elements of a gripping story, a suspicious death, a tumultuous relationship,
33:40
Speaker 2: a murder trial, questions of morality, feminism, power and balance,
33:44
Speaker 2: and a divided our world. On September eighth, nineteen eighty five,
33:48
Speaker 2: up and coming artist Anna Mendietta fell from the thirty
33:51
Speaker 2: fourth floor window of her husband and famous sculptor Karl
33:55
Speaker 2: Andre's apartment. Host Helen Molesworth asks was Karl Andre involved?
34:01
Speaker 2: You'll revisit on his untimely death. The trial that followed
34:05
Speaker 2: and both the protests and silence that have followed this
34:08
Speaker 2: story ever since. Okay, here comes a sneak peek. You
34:12
Speaker 2: can follow the story by searching for Death of an
34:14
Speaker 2: Artist wherever you get your podcasts.
34:18
Speaker 6: It's May nineteen seventy three, Iowa City. There's a damp
34:24
Speaker 6: chill in the air. We are on a sort of
34:27
Speaker 6: shabby block in front of a brick apartment building with
34:30
Speaker 6: a white door in need of a paint job, and
34:32
Speaker 6: a storefront window with its blind strawn shut. The sidewalk
34:38
Speaker 6: just in front of the door is covered in blood,
34:43
Speaker 6: and it looks like the blood might be seeping out
34:45
Speaker 6: from under the door jam. It's a busy weekday, and
34:50
Speaker 6: as pedestrians pass the puddle of blood, they notice it
34:53
Speaker 6: and casually step around it. Eventually, a man in a
34:57
Speaker 6: green and black plaid jacket pauses and looks around as
35:02
Speaker 6: if looking for an explanation. When none comes, he walks away.
35:07
Speaker 6: Then a well dressed white woman uses her umbrella to
35:10
Speaker 6: poke at the bloody puddle, but after a moment or
35:13
Speaker 6: two of inspection, she also walks away. Finally, an older
35:19
Speaker 6: gentleman emerges from a nearby storefront and silently cleans up
35:23
Speaker 6: the mess, and the evidence of whatever happened is suddenly gone,
35:28
Speaker 6: and with it disappears any account of whose blood was
35:31
Speaker 6: spilled and how. The whole scene is being captured by
35:39
Speaker 6: two young women in their twenties, sisters, who sit in
35:43
Speaker 6: an old car park nearby. One of them holds a
35:47
Speaker 6: super eight camera, the kind you'd make home movies with
35:50
Speaker 6: back then the other snaps photos with a thirty five
35:54
Speaker 6: millimeter camera. They are Anna and Raklein Mendietta, Cuban refugees
36:00
Speaker 6: who landed in this unlikely place as children in nineteen
36:08
Speaker 6: seven three. Anna was a first year MFA student at
36:12
Speaker 6: the University of Iowa. She was funny, loud, outrageous and
36:16
Speaker 6: had to take no prisoner's vibe, and in the way
36:20
Speaker 6: of sisters, she had roped direct clean into helping her
36:23
Speaker 6: make a new piece, and like many works on a maid,
36:27
Speaker 6: it would come to seem tragically prophetic in the wake
36:30
Speaker 6: of her death.
36:32
Speaker 10: She basically staged what looked like the remnants of, you know,
36:39
Speaker 10: physical violence with what looked like blood in the doorway
36:42
Speaker 10: of a building, and I thought it was extremely powerful
36:46
Speaker 10: for a very young artist to be doing that, and
36:49
Speaker 10: to be doing it in this small, largely white town
36:52
Speaker 10: of Iowa City was fascinating to me.
36:56
Speaker 6: That's Connie Butler, one of the many curators who would
36:59
Speaker 6: come to admire and study on A Mendieta's work in
37:01
Speaker 6: the decades that followed. The photos in film the Mendieta
37:05
Speaker 6: sisters took that day would ultimately become a work of
37:08
Speaker 6: art called Moffat Building Piece.
37:12
Speaker 10: The fact that it still exists only in these little
37:14
Speaker 10: thirty five millimeters slides, which you know you have to
37:17
Speaker 10: get very close to with a loop, and it's a
37:21
Speaker 10: very intimate way of viewing these things, you know, that
37:25
Speaker 10: implicates you as a view were too, almost as if
37:27
Speaker 10: you are yourself looking at a crime scene.
37:30
Speaker 6: Anna's interest in blood wasn't only meant to shock. She
37:33
Speaker 6: was keenly aware of violence and injustice. When she made
37:37
Speaker 6: the Maffat Building Piece, she was investigating her own community's
37:41
Speaker 6: reaction to a brutal crime, a rape and murder that
37:45
Speaker 6: had happened on campus a few months before. Here's how
37:48
Speaker 6: she explained her inspiration.
37:51
Speaker 5: A young woman was killed, raped and killed at Iowa
37:55
Speaker 5: in one of the dorms, and it just really freaked
37:57
Speaker 5: me out. So I did some of rape performances type
38:01
Speaker 5: things at that time, using my own body, I did
38:05
Speaker 5: something I believe in and that I felt I had
38:08
Speaker 5: to do.
38:09
Speaker 6: That's not actually an A Mendieta's voice you're hearing. That
38:13
Speaker 6: was Tanya Brighera, another artist from Cuba who you'll hear
38:16
Speaker 6: from more later. Anamandieza's question was could you make art
38:26
Speaker 6: about something so awful? And she used blood, not paint.
38:31
Speaker 6: Blood is the most essential substance of life. Could it
38:34
Speaker 6: jolt people out of their daily routines? Could blood make
38:38
Speaker 6: people pay attention? She didn't know it yet, but the
38:42
Speaker 6: Moffat Building piece was about to be her first major artwork,
38:46
Speaker 6: and in a circular way, that's kind of terrifying. The
38:50
Speaker 6: question she asked about how we react when we encounter
38:54
Speaker 6: the residue of violence. This question would haunt all of
38:58
Speaker 6: us after she died. I'm your host Helen Mulesworth and
39:06
Speaker 6: from Pushkin Industries, Something Else and Sony Music Entertainment. This
39:11
Speaker 6: is Death of an Artist Episode one. The haunting For
39:28
Speaker 6: my entire professional life, I've been a member of something
39:31
Speaker 6: called the art World, an exclusive network of artists, gallery dealers, curators, collectors,
39:38
Speaker 6: and philanthropists for two decades. I was lucky enough to
39:42
Speaker 6: be a museum curator, making me one of a small
39:45
Speaker 6: group of cultural insiders who determine what art we see
39:49
Speaker 6: and how we talk about it. In the museum world
39:52
Speaker 6: and in art history, there are a lot of unspoken
39:55
Speaker 6: rules about what you can say publicly and what is
39:58
Speaker 6: supposed to stay private. It turns out I wasn't that
40:02
Speaker 6: good at sticking to the script, and I guess I'm
40:06
Speaker 6: still not good at it, because I'm going to tell
40:08
Speaker 6: you on A and Dietta's whole story all the way
40:12
Speaker 6: to its shocking and troubling end, and much to my surprise,
40:19
Speaker 6: I discovered it's a story many of my colleagues in
40:22
Speaker 6: the art world would prefer I didn't tell at first, blush.
40:30
Speaker 6: It seemed like people didn't want me to talk about
40:32
Speaker 6: it because of who else is part of that story.
40:35
Speaker 6: Anna's husband, the famous sculptor Carl andre He is one
40:40
Speaker 6: of the so called fathers of minimalism, a cultural hero
40:44
Speaker 6: to many are revered artists with lots of connections, and
40:49
Speaker 6: he was a suspect in Anna's death. Even though Carl
40:56
Speaker 6: Andrea and Anna Mendieta were a highly visible art world couple,
41:00
Speaker 6: even though something terrible happened between them the night she died,
41:04
Speaker 6: you will not read about it on a museum wall
41:06
Speaker 6: label or in most art history text book reviews of
41:10
Speaker 6: their exhibitions tend to take care of it in a
41:13
Speaker 6: sentence or two. You would not know that Mendieta's death
41:17
Speaker 6: divided the art world in nineteen eighty five, and in
41:20
Speaker 6: many ways still does. I'm not the first person to
41:29
Speaker 6: try and tell this story. In fact, many of the
41:32
Speaker 6: voices you'll hear in this show are from interviews conducted
41:36
Speaker 6: by investigative journalist Robert Katz. He published a book in
41:40
Speaker 6: nineteen ninety that remains the most comprehensive look into this
41:44
Speaker 6: art world tragedy. He spoke with dozens of Anna and
41:48
Speaker 6: Carl's friends in noisy restaurants, in parks, in busy offices,
41:52
Speaker 6: and you'll hear the voices of some art world insiders
41:55
Speaker 6: on these tapes who have since decided not to talk.
42:00
Speaker 6: Most folks don't want to discuss what happened that night.
42:03
Speaker 6: They don't want to talk about what the ramifications of
42:05
Speaker 6: that night were on the art world. They don't want
42:08
Speaker 6: to con and plate what it means when a community
42:11
Speaker 6: is torn apart by violence, and they don't want to
42:14
Speaker 6: discuss whether or not justice has been served. All these
42:19
Speaker 6: different folks not talking for all of their different reasons
42:23
Speaker 6: means that a veil of silence started to fall over
42:26
Speaker 6: this project, and I can't lie. The more silence we encountered,
42:32
Speaker 6: the more sad and frustrated I became. And the more
42:35
Speaker 6: silence we encountered, the more I wanted to talk.