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The Great Starvation Experiment
Todd Tucker
The Heroic Men Who Starved so That Millions Could Live
Free Press
May 2006
288 pages
ISBN: 0743270304
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
What does it feel like to starve? To feel your body cry out
for nourishment, to think only of food? How many fitful,
hungry nights must pass before dreams of home-cooked meals
metastasize into nightmares of cannibalism? Why would anyone
volunteer to find out? In The Great Starvation Experiment, historian Todd Tucker
tells the harrowing story of thirty-six young men who
willingly and bravely faced down profound, consuming hunger.
As conscientious objectors during World War II, these men
were eager to help in the war effort but restricted from
combat by their pacifist beliefs. So, instead, they
volunteered to become guinea pigs in one of the most unusual
experiments in medical history -- one that required a year
of systematic starvation. Dr. Ancel Keys was already famous for inventing the K ration
when the War Department asked for his help with feeding the
starving citizens of Europe and the Far East at the war's
end. Fascists and Communists, it was feared, could gain a
foothold in war-ravaged areas. "Starved people," Keys liked
to say, "can't be taught Democracy." The government needed
to know the best way to rehabilitate those people who had
been severely underfed during the long war. To study
rehabilitation, Keys first needed to create a pool of
starving test subjects. Gathered in a cutting-edge lab underneath the football
stadium at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Keys' test
subjects forsook most food and were monitored constantly so
that Dr. Keys and his scientists could study the effects of
starvation on otherwise healthy people. While the weight
loss of the men followed a neat mathematical curve, the
psychological deterioration was less predictable. Some men
drank quarts and quarts of water to fill their empty
stomachs. One man chewed as many as forty packs of gum a
day. One man mutilated himself to escape the experiment.
Ultimately only four of the men were expelled from the
experiment for cheating -- a testament to the volunteers'
determination and toughness. To prevent atrocities of the kind committed by the Nazi
doctors, international law now prevents this kind of
experimentation on healthy people. But in this remarkable
book, Todd Tucker captures a lost sliver of American history
-- a time when cold scientific principles collided with
living, breathing human beings. Tucker depicts the agony and
endurance of a group of extraordinary men whose lives were
altered not only for the year they participated in the
experiment, but forever.
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