Transcript: They Volunteered to Starve for Six Months. Would They Do It Again?
Every line of episode 3 as narrated, with the time it starts. Back to the episode page.
They were asked to starve for six months.
Hundreds said yes.
Almost sixty years later, eighteen of the survivors were asked if they would do it again.
Samuel Legg once hated a boy on a bicycle for going home to supper.
In 1944, the call came on a pamphlet.
Its cover asked one question. Will you starve that they be better fed?
Thirty six men were chosen to live inside a university laboratory.
But these men chose it. They had refused to fight in the war.
One of the thirty six was Harold Blickenstaff.
Decades later, he and other survivors told what it was like.
As the war was ending, Allied troops entering German occupied Europe found starving civilians.
Science knew relatively little about starvation, or about how to feed starved people back to health.
Ancel Keys was a young professor of physiology at the University of Minnesota.
He proposed a bold test. Make healthy volunteers go hungry, then feed them back up.
A 1948 history of the program says the lab was to be a controlled miniature of the kind of famine that hit western Holland.
So why would men who refused to fight sign up to starve?
Keys looked among the conscientious objectors.
Their draft boards classed them as objectors, and they were sent to work camps instead.
They did forestry and fought fires, in camps run by the peace churches.
The War Department let Keys look for healthy men among about twelve thousand of them.
Many of these men wanted to do something useful in a war they would not fight.
Decades later, William Anderson gave his reason.
No one could make me kill anyone else.
Carlyle Frederick put it another way.
My definition of patriotism included my refusal to kill.
So when the pamphlet came round the camps, hundreds answered.
Thirty six were picked.
Max Kampelman was one of them. He said the staff were honest about what was coming.
They explained what was going to happen.
There was nothing held back.
He said they could not promise there would be no lasting damage.
They did not know. That was what they were trying to find out.
On November the nineteenth, 1944, the thirty six men moved into the laboratory.
It sat inside the football stadium at the University of Minnesota.
They slept in rooms with no windows.
Keys called them our cage.
For the first three months, nobody went hungry.
The men said they felt well fed and full of energy.
Robert Villwock played the accordion and called square dances in town.
Wesley Miller worked as an usher for the Minneapolis Symphony, so he could hear the concerts for free.
Then, on February the twelfth, 1945, the food was cut.
The new diet copied what people were eating in the war in Europe.
Potatoes, turnips, rutabagas, dark bread and macaroni.
It would last six months.
As the months went on, the men lost their early enthusiasm.
The men grew short tempered and impatient with one another.
Carlyle Frederick remembered noticing what was wrong with everybody else, even his best friend.
Their idiosyncrasies became great big deals.
Food took over their days.
Robert Willoughby said eating became a ritual.
The men found slow, careful ways to make a small plate last.
Some of them started collecting cookbooks.
Carlyle Frederick said he owned nearly a hundred by the end.
The scientists asked the men about it near the end of the hungry months.
Of thirty four men who answered, nineteen said they had been reading cookbooks and collecting recipes.
Harold Blickenstaff described it this way.
Food became the one central and only thing really in one's life.
And life is pretty dull if that's the only thing.
Their bodies were giving out too.
Even a short walk became hard work.
Then the staff brought in a buddy system.
Outside the lab, the men had to go out in pairs.
One reason, a 1948 history says, was the strain of resisting food in town.
Jasper Garner was glad of it for a plainer reason.
At a department store in town, he could not push the rotating door.
He said he got stuck.
Almost sixty years later, Samuel Legg called one moment from those months the most poignant of all.
He was out walking with his buddy, deep into the hungry months.
They were so tired that they looked for driveways, so they would not have to step up a curb.
A kid came by on a bicycle, really moving.
I know where he's going. He's going home for supper.
And I'm not.
Then, for a moment, Legg said, he hated the boy.
But I remember with horror that I could feel such a thing.
So utterly irrational, but there it was.
Not every man held the line.
Two volunteers broke the diet and were let go from the experiment.
Both went through serious distress, and both spent a short time on the university hospital's psychiatric ward.
Others chewed so much gum that the staff had to limit it.
In the end, four of the thirty six are missing from the final data.
The two who were let go, and two more whose data could not be used.
The study's results rest on thirty two.
Harold Blickenstaff said he never even debated breaking the diet.
He said walking by a bakery was like walking by a bank.
It might be nice to have what's in there, but it's out of the question.
Asked if they ever thought of quitting, the survivors who were interviewed gave the same short answer.
No.
Outside the lab, the war was ending.
The war in Europe ended in May 1945.
The men were still on the diet.
That July, Life magazine ran a feature called Men Starve in Minnesota.
The story reached millions.
Earl Heckman said what several of them felt.
We had hoped to have an effect on the world hunger situation following the war.
The experiment was a little late.
At the end of July, the six hungry months were over.
This was the second half of Keys's question.
How do you bring a starved person back?
The men were split into four groups, each given a different amount of food.
For some of the men, the hard part was only starting.
Roscoe Hinkle said the refeeding turned out to be worse for him than anything else.
I had troubles because I didn't really feel that I was coming back at all.
The scientists saw it in their records too.
After a few good days, they wrote, there was a pronounced slump in morale.
More food did not calm the hunger.
At first it often seemed to sharpen it.
Several men told the staff that their concern for the welfare of mankind had become hard to hold on to.
A 1946 manual for relief workers called recovery two steps ahead and one step backwards.
The swings in mood at the start of refeeding were bigger than anything they had shown while starving.
The same manual said their basic personalities did not change.
On October the twentieth, 1945, the controlled diet ended.
The men were free to eat as they wished.
But none of them remembered getting detailed advice on how.
All of the survivors interviewed agreed they were not back to normal after those three months.
Their guesses for a full recovery ran from two months to two years.
Eighteen of these men would later be asked if they would go through all of it again.
Even before the study ended, Keys had shared what they were learning.
At a conference in Chicago in 1945, he said this.
Enough food must be supplied to allow tissues destroyed during starvation to be rebuilt.
The findings went to relief groups at home and abroad, and to the military.
In 1950 the team published their results, in two volumes.
A 2021 review calls the book the undisputed source of scientific reference on what long hunger does to body and behaviour.
Researchers still cite it when they look at how going without food affects thinking and social life in anorexia and bulimia.
In 2021, two researchers looked back at the study and called it wrong.
Lederman and Voo, writing in a bioethics journal, argued it is a case of unethical research.
Keys may have wondered too.
Richard Mundy recalled that Keys's wife said Keys went through terrible times during the study.
In Mundy's telling, Keys would come home and say this.
What am I doing to these young men?
I had no idea it was going to be this hard.
Samuel Legg saw the gap between them and the people they hoped to help.
We were starving under the best possible medical conditions.
And most of all, we knew the exact day on which our torture was going to end.
None of that was true of people in Belgium, the Netherlands, or whatever.
Then, almost sixty years on, two researchers, Kalm and Semba, went looking for the men.
Nineteen of the thirty six were still alive.
Eighteen of them were interviewed, each in his eighties.
Many went on following the convictions that brought them to the lab.
Seven of the eighteen helped ship livestock to postwar Europe with Heifers for Relief.
Marshall Sutton went to Gaza to feed refugees, with the American Friends Service Committee.
William Anderson became a minister and spent nearly thirty years working in Africa.
Max Kampelman went into law and diplomacy.
And Harold Blickenstaff went to Poland.
From 1948 to 1950, he worked on a transport team bringing building materials to people whose homes the war had destroyed.
About the experiment itself, he was blunt.
I don't know many other things in my life that I looked forward to being over with any more than this experiment.
Wesley Miller said it coloured his whole life.
One of the most important things I ever did.
Almost sixty years later, every one of the eighteen said yes.
Knowing how it felt, they would sign up again.
Daniel Peacock put an age on it.
Now remember, I'd do it again if I were to be twenty four again!
Samuel Legg once hated a boy on a bicycle for going home to supper.
I think probably most of us are feeling we did something good and are glad we did it, and that helps us live a better life.
Their words come from interviews that Kalm and Semba published in 2005.
Next time, the Stanford prison study.
A 2019 paper by a researcher named Le Texier went through its archive and interviewed fifteen of its participants.
The paper says the guards were given precise instructions on how to treat the prisoners.