# Transcript: They Volunteered to Starve for Six Months. Would They Do It Again?

Source page: https://underthebehavior.com/episodes/minnesota-starvation-experiment/transcript

The full transcript of episode 3 of Under the Behavior, the minnesota starvation experiment, with the time each line starts and a link back to the episode.

Every line of episode 3 as narrated, with the time it starts. [Back to the episode page](https://underthebehavior.com/episodes/minnesota-starvation-experiment).

0:00 They were asked to starve for six months.

0:03 Hundreds said yes.

0:05 Almost sixty years later, eighteen of the survivors were asked if they would do it again.

0:11 Samuel Legg once hated a boy on a bicycle for going home to supper.

0:16 In 1944, the call came on a pamphlet.

0:19 Its cover asked one question. Will you starve that they be better fed?

0:25 Thirty six men were chosen to live inside a university laboratory.

0:29 But these men chose it. They had refused to fight in the war.

0:33 One of the thirty six was Harold Blickenstaff.

0:36 Decades later, he and other survivors told what it was like.

0:41 As the war was ending, Allied troops entering German occupied Europe found starving civilians.

0:47 Science knew relatively little about starvation, or about how to feed starved people back to health.

0:54 Ancel Keys was a young professor of physiology at the University of Minnesota.

0:59 He proposed a bold test. Make healthy volunteers go hungry, then feed them back up.

1:05 A 1948 history of the program says the lab was to be a controlled miniature of the kind of famine that hit western Holland.

1:14 So why would men who refused to fight sign up to starve?

1:19 Keys looked among the conscientious objectors.

1:21 Their draft boards classed them as objectors, and they were sent to work camps instead.

1:26 They did forestry and fought fires, in camps run by the peace churches.

1:31 The War Department let Keys look for healthy men among about twelve thousand of them.

1:35 Many of these men wanted to do something useful in a war they would not fight.

1:40 Decades later, William Anderson gave his reason.

1:43 No one could make me kill anyone else.

1:46 Carlyle Frederick put it another way.

1:48 My definition of patriotism included my refusal to kill.

1:53 So when the pamphlet came round the camps, hundreds answered.

1:56 Thirty six were picked.

1:58 Max Kampelman was one of them. He said the staff were honest about what was coming.

2:03 They explained what was going to happen.

2:05 There was nothing held back.

2:07 He said they could not promise there would be no lasting damage.

2:11 They did not know. That was what they were trying to find out.

2:15 On November the nineteenth, 1944, the thirty six men moved into the laboratory.

2:21 It sat inside the football stadium at the University of Minnesota.

2:24 They slept in rooms with no windows.

2:27 Keys called them our cage.

2:31 For the first three months, nobody went hungry.

2:34 The men said they felt well fed and full of energy.

2:37 Robert Villwock played the accordion and called square dances in town.

2:41 Wesley Miller worked as an usher for the Minneapolis Symphony, so he could hear the concerts for free.

2:48 Then, on February the twelfth, 1945, the food was cut.

2:54 The new diet copied what people were eating in the war in Europe.

2:57 Potatoes, turnips, rutabagas, dark bread and macaroni.

3:02 It would last six months.

3:04 As the months went on, the men lost their early enthusiasm.

3:08 The men grew short tempered and impatient with one another.

3:11 Carlyle Frederick remembered noticing what was wrong with everybody else, even his best friend.

3:17 Their idiosyncrasies became great big deals.

3:20 Food took over their days.

3:23 Robert Willoughby said eating became a ritual.

3:26 The men found slow, careful ways to make a small plate last.

3:30 Some of them started collecting cookbooks.

3:33 Carlyle Frederick said he owned nearly a hundred by the end.

3:36 The scientists asked the men about it near the end of the hungry months.

3:40 Of thirty four men who answered, nineteen said they had been reading cookbooks and collecting recipes.

3:46 Harold Blickenstaff described it this way.

3:48 Food became the one central and only thing really in one's life.

3:53 And life is pretty dull if that's the only thing.

3:56 Their bodies were giving out too.

3:59 Even a short walk became hard work.

4:01 Then the staff brought in a buddy system.

4:04 Outside the lab, the men had to go out in pairs.

4:07 One reason, a 1948 history says, was the strain of resisting food in town.

4:13 Jasper Garner was glad of it for a plainer reason.

4:16 At a department store in town, he could not push the rotating door.

4:20 He said he got stuck.

4:23 Almost sixty years later, Samuel Legg called one moment from those months the most poignant of all.

4:29 He was out walking with his buddy, deep into the hungry months.

4:33 They were so tired that they looked for driveways, so they would not have to step up a curb.

4:38 A kid came by on a bicycle, really moving.

4:41 I know where he's going. He's going home for supper.

4:44 And I'm not.

4:45 Then, for a moment, Legg said, he hated the boy.

4:50 But I remember with horror that I could feel such a thing.

4:53 So utterly irrational, but there it was.

4:57 Not every man held the line.

4:59 Two volunteers broke the diet and were let go from the experiment.

5:03 Both went through serious distress, and both spent a short time on the university hospital's psychiatric ward.

5:10 Others chewed so much gum that the staff had to limit it.

5:14 In the end, four of the thirty six are missing from the final data.

5:19 The two who were let go, and two more whose data could not be used.

5:23 The study's results rest on thirty two.

5:26 Harold Blickenstaff said he never even debated breaking the diet.

5:30 He said walking by a bakery was like walking by a bank.

5:34 It might be nice to have what's in there, but it's out of the question.

5:38 Asked if they ever thought of quitting, the survivors who were interviewed gave the same short answer.

5:44 No.

5:45 Outside the lab, the war was ending.

5:48 The war in Europe ended in May 1945.

5:51 The men were still on the diet.

5:54 That July, Life magazine ran a feature called Men Starve in Minnesota.

5:59 The story reached millions.

6:01 Earl Heckman said what several of them felt.

6:04 We had hoped to have an effect on the world hunger situation following the war.

6:08 The experiment was a little late.

6:12 At the end of July, the six hungry months were over.

6:16 This was the second half of Keys's question.

6:19 How do you bring a starved person back?

6:21 The men were split into four groups, each given a different amount of food.

6:26 For some of the men, the hard part was only starting.

6:29 Roscoe Hinkle said the refeeding turned out to be worse for him than anything else.

6:34 I had troubles because I didn't really feel that I was coming back at all.

6:39 The scientists saw it in their records too.

6:41 After a few good days, they wrote, there was a pronounced slump in morale.

6:46 More food did not calm the hunger.

6:48 At first it often seemed to sharpen it.

6:51 Several men told the staff that their concern for the welfare of mankind had become hard to hold on to.

6:58 A 1946 manual for relief workers called recovery two steps ahead and one step backwards.

7:04 The swings in mood at the start of refeeding were bigger than anything they had shown while starving.

7:10 The same manual said their basic personalities did not change.

7:14 On October the twentieth, 1945, the controlled diet ended.

7:19 The men were free to eat as they wished.

7:21 But none of them remembered getting detailed advice on how.

7:25 All of the survivors interviewed agreed they were not back to normal after those three months.

7:30 Their guesses for a full recovery ran from two months to two years.

7:35 Eighteen of these men would later be asked if they would go through all of it again.

7:41 Even before the study ended, Keys had shared what they were learning.

7:45 At a conference in Chicago in 1945, he said this.

7:49 Enough food must be supplied to allow tissues destroyed during starvation to be rebuilt.

7:54 The findings went to relief groups at home and abroad, and to the military.

7:59 In 1950 the team published their results, in two volumes.

8:04 A 2021 review calls the book the undisputed source of scientific reference on what long hunger does to body and behaviour.

8:12 Researchers still cite it when they look at how going without food affects thinking and social life in anorexia and bulimia.

8:20 In 2021, two researchers looked back at the study and called it wrong.

8:24 Lederman and Voo, writing in a bioethics journal, argued it is a case of unethical research.

8:31 Keys may have wondered too.

8:33 Richard Mundy recalled that Keys's wife said Keys went through terrible times during the study.

8:39 In Mundy's telling, Keys would come home and say this.

8:42 What am I doing to these young men?

8:44 I had no idea it was going to be this hard.

8:48 Samuel Legg saw the gap between them and the people they hoped to help.

8:52 We were starving under the best possible medical conditions.

8:56 And most of all, we knew the exact day on which our torture was going to end.

9:02 None of that was true of people in Belgium, the Netherlands, or whatever.

9:07 Then, almost sixty years on, two researchers, Kalm and Semba, went looking for the men.

9:14 Nineteen of the thirty six were still alive.

9:17 Eighteen of them were interviewed, each in his eighties.

9:21 Many went on following the convictions that brought them to the lab.

9:25 Seven of the eighteen helped ship livestock to postwar Europe with Heifers for Relief.

9:30 Marshall Sutton went to Gaza to feed refugees, with the American Friends Service Committee.

9:35 William Anderson became a minister and spent nearly thirty years working in Africa.

9:40 Max Kampelman went into law and diplomacy.

9:43 And Harold Blickenstaff went to Poland.

9:45 From 1948 to 1950, he worked on a transport team bringing building materials to people whose homes the war had destroyed.

9:53 About the experiment itself, he was blunt.

9:56 I don't know many other things in my life that I looked forward to being over with any more than this experiment.

10:03 Wesley Miller said it coloured his whole life.

10:07 One of the most important things I ever did.

10:10 Almost sixty years later, every one of the eighteen said yes.

10:15 Knowing how it felt, they would sign up again.

10:18 Daniel Peacock put an age on it.

10:21 Now remember, I'd do it again if I were to be twenty four again!

10:25 Samuel Legg once hated a boy on a bicycle for going home to supper.

10:29 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.

10:38 Their words come from interviews that Kalm and Semba published in 2005.

10:44 Next time, the Stanford prison study.

10:47 A 2019 paper by a researcher named Le Texier went through its archive and interviewed fifteen of its participants.

10:55 The paper says the guards were given precise instructions on how to treat the prisoners.

They Volunteered to Starve for Six Months. Would They Do It Again?

11:46 · Episode 3 · YouTube [Watch the episode](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQC6Kx2vdfU)