Speaker 1: Pushkin right out of the blue.
Speaker 2: Out of the blue, and what does he say?
Speaker 1: He says, doctor Franz, I've heard the possibility that there
Speaker 1: might be some very interesting data in your father's basement.
Speaker 2: I'm talking to Robert Frantz, a cardiologist at the Mayo
Speaker 2: Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, about a phone call he'd got
Speaker 2: not long ago from a man named Chris Ramsden. He
Speaker 2: had a question for Robert Frantz about his father.
Speaker 1: My parents lived in the same house for over fifty years,
Speaker 1: and essentially my father passed and then my mother was
Speaker 1: living and assisted living.
Speaker 2: The house was empty. The family hadn't gotten around to
Speaker 2: selling it.
Speaker 1: So we just sort of left it. Nobody was necessarily
Speaker 1: living in it, but it was there. And so when
Speaker 1: Chris said there might be something in the basement of interest.
Speaker 2: I feel like every great Midwestern detective story begins with
Speaker 2: the line there might be something in the basement of interest.
Speaker 1: I had some concern because the joke in our family
Speaker 1: was that if we ever need to sell that house,
Speaker 1: we should just call the Air Force and call in
Speaker 1: a n apalm strike. There were files that had every
Speaker 1: paper that my father had ever published, and every PhD
Speaker 1: thesis that he'd ever reviewed. And he was also an
Speaker 1: amateur radio operator and he built his own radios. He
Speaker 1: handwound his own coils and built his own receivers, and
Speaker 1: so there's all this radio stuff down there. So there
Speaker 1: was a lot of stuff in that basement.
Speaker 2: When Chris called, my name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening
Speaker 2: to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.
Speaker 2: This episode is the final episode of the season, season two.
Speaker 2: It's a medical mystery, a detective story about a long
Speaker 2: forgotten scientific study, a study with a crucial clue. I
Speaker 2: left this episode to the last for a reason because
Speaker 2: it is also, in many ways, the most personal of
Speaker 2: this year's stories. And it was Robert Franz who got
Speaker 2: me thinking about all this. I didn't meet Robert Franz
Speaker 2: in person. I was just calling him to clarify a
Speaker 2: few questions from another story I was working on. The
Speaker 2: previous episode, in fact, the one about French Fries. It
Speaker 2: wasn't worth flying all the way to Minnesota for this
Speaker 2: one interview. I thought I was at my parents' home
Speaker 2: in Canada and preoccupied. I actually conducted the interview with
Speaker 2: France in my rental car on my cell phone with
Speaker 2: my little tape recorder on the dashboard, with someone in
Speaker 2: Minnesota recording Robert France's end of the conversation. But now
Speaker 2: I wish I'd met him face to face, because I
Speaker 2: found what he had to say about the obligation of
Speaker 2: a son to his father to be unexpectedly beautiful. How
Speaker 2: hard was it for you to find what he was
Speaker 2: looking for?
Speaker 1: Well, their home is about ninety miles from where I
Speaker 1: live down here in Rochester at the mail clinic, And
Speaker 1: so what I did is I would drive up there
Speaker 1: after work and spend a couple hours in the evening
Speaker 1: looking around and going through files. And I did that
Speaker 1: three or four times before I actually found the files
Speaker 1: that were of interest. And on that third or fourth time,
Speaker 1: I really came to truly one of the back corners
Speaker 1: of the basement, and there was a moldering, old cardboard
Speaker 1: box there that I opened up, and I just immediately
Speaker 1: thought to myself, Eureka, I have found.
Speaker 2: It Robert Franz's father. The man who left the box
Speaker 2: in the basement was Ivan Franz Junior, born in Smithville,
Speaker 2: West Virginia, in nineteen sixteen. He was slender and upright,
Speaker 2: with a magnificent head of hair, which he kept all
Speaker 2: his life. He flew planes, tinkered with radios, played the clarinet.
Speaker 2: He wrote his scientific paper's long hand, sitting at the
Speaker 2: dining room table in immaculate handwriting on yellow legal pads, pencil, eraser,
Speaker 2: pencil sharpener, all just so he was precise, punctual. Neither
Speaker 2: of his parents had finished high school. He ended up
Speaker 2: getting a degree from Harvard Medical School and then taught
Speaker 2: for thirty four years at the University of Minnesota. Ivan
Speaker 2: France was one of those unstoppable smart kids from the provinces.
Speaker 2: Not long before his death, Ivan Franz was interviewed for
Speaker 2: the university's archives.
Speaker 3: I made the final decision to go to medical school
Speaker 3: when I was a freshman in high school.
Speaker 4: That's a story I'd like to hear.
Speaker 3: And how did I decide to do that?
Speaker 5: Well.
Speaker 3: I noticed how my parents felt about people, and the
Speaker 3: only people that I could see that they really respected
Speaker 3: were the Baptist preacher and the physician that took care
Speaker 3: of them. I knew I would never make it as
Speaker 3: a preacher.
Speaker 2: I'd run this whole interview if I could.
Speaker 3: I had another decision at that point too, that I
Speaker 3: was offered a chance to play in a band in
Speaker 3: a cruise ship going between New York and Livermore, and
Speaker 3: at the same time the chemistry department asked me to
Speaker 3: do a little research project in the summer, saying, there again,
Speaker 3: I made the wrong decision with the counsels department.
Speaker 5: I see you never got to play the clarinet then
Speaker 5: for rich people on the luxury ship.
Speaker 3: No, what a loss to music. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Ivan France did not end up on cruise ships. He
Speaker 2: chose instead to devote his life to studying heart disease,
Speaker 2: specifically to understanding the role of cholesterol and blood lipids
Speaker 2: in heart attacks. He took his research seriously. Robert Franz
Speaker 2: says that his father raised his five boys according to
Speaker 2: the best practices of nutritional science.
Speaker 1: My dad would occasionally come home and say, hey, let's
Speaker 1: look at the lipids and the family and we'd line
Speaker 1: up and my mom would draw our blood because she
Speaker 1: felt she was better at it than my father, and
Speaker 1: he'd bring it down to the lab and look at
Speaker 1: our lipid profiles.
Speaker 2: You don't remember your lipid profile, do you, Well.
Speaker 1: They're always pretty good, you know, because I think from
Speaker 1: an early stage, my family tended to eat a low
Speaker 1: saturated fa diet. I remember a day when my dad
Speaker 1: brought back a piece of something that was the first
Speaker 1: efforts at making something like supposed to taste like steak
Speaker 1: or hamburg er, but was actually had no meat in it.
Speaker 1: And so these early efforts were foisted upon us, and
Speaker 1: we did our best to help my father to understand
Speaker 1: that making something it tastes like meat that isn't meat
Speaker 1: is not going to be an easy thing to do.
Speaker 4: You were his guinea pigs, well, in a.
Speaker 1: Way, we were, and I think it's true that he
Speaker 1: would have these ideas about things and say, well, let's
Speaker 1: try this. It's not really meat, but it's supposed to
Speaker 1: taste like meat, and maybe this is a way we
Speaker 1: can try to reduce our saturated fat intake.
Speaker 2: Yeah, did he weigh in on He sounds like he
Speaker 2: must have weighed in on what the family should be eating.
Speaker 1: We basically ate a lot of vegetables, you know, like
Speaker 1: lightly steamed broccoli with some lemon and pepper on it
Speaker 1: or something, and maybe a little bit of margarine.
Speaker 2: In the nineteen sixties, Robert's father decided he'd gone as
Speaker 2: far as he could in answering technical questions about the
Speaker 2: way in which Gleustro was sit theesized by the body.
Speaker 2: He wanted to do something more practical or useful, so
Speaker 2: he ran an idea by the head of the Heart
Speaker 2: Institute at the National Institutes of Health.
Speaker 3: This guy that wasn't ahead of that down there used
Speaker 3: to come up and visit me once in a while
Speaker 3: to see if I was doing what I was supposed
Speaker 3: to do with NIH. My he he wanted to play chess,
Speaker 3: so every time he would come up here, we'd have
Speaker 3: to get together in the evening and play chess fair enough.
Speaker 3: So I was starting to become a common old boys network,
Speaker 3: and I told him that I thought that that was
Speaker 3: something that the NIH should do, was to organize a
Speaker 3: big study in the general population to find out if
Speaker 3: there really was a relationship between diet, cholesterol and hard disease.
Speaker 2: Let's take a step backwards for a moment, because you
Speaker 2: can't understand the importance of what France was suggesting and
Speaker 2: why the basement tapes would ultimately matter so much until
Speaker 2: you understand how scientists usually study diet. There are lots
Speaker 2: of ways to analyze the effect that diet has on health.
Speaker 2: You can do an observational study, for example, identify tens
Speaker 2: of thousands of people, have them fill out a questionnaire
Speaker 2: on their diet at regular intervals over many years. Then
Speaker 2: keep track of when they die and what they die of,
Speaker 2: and look for patterns. That's what an epidemiological study is.
Speaker 2: France had a colleague at the University of Minnesota named
Speaker 2: Ansel Keys who conducted maybe the most famous epidemiological study
Speaker 2: of diet and health in history. For twenty five years.
Speaker 2: Keys collected data on about twelve thousand middle aged men
Speaker 2: in Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Finland, the Japan and the United States,
Speaker 2: and he came to the conclusion that the people eating
Speaker 2: what he called a Mediterranean diet lots of fish, vegetables,
Speaker 2: olive oil, and very little saturated fat, those people had
Speaker 2: the fewest heart attacks. Keys was massively influential. The problem
Speaker 2: is epidemiological studies are really tricky. For example, in France,
Speaker 2: people eat lots of butter and cheese and things cooked
Speaker 2: in fat, yet they have really low rates of heart disease.
Speaker 2: France was not included in the seven country study. Would
Speaker 2: Ansel Keys's results have been different? If he'd added France
Speaker 2: and done an eight country study. With epidemiological studies, you
Speaker 2: can get in real trouble if you pick the wrong populations.
Speaker 2: And how does Keys know that it's all the olive
Speaker 2: oil and fish and vegetables of the Mediterranean diet that
Speaker 2: make people from those places live so long. He's noticed
Speaker 2: an association between that diet and good health, but an
Speaker 2: epidemial logical study can't prove causation. Many years later, another
Speaker 2: researcher went back and reanalyzed Keys data and showed that
Speaker 2: people's consumption of sugar was a much better predictor of
Speaker 2: their health than their consumption of saturated fat. The only
Speaker 2: way around these problems is to do a controlled clinical trial,
Speaker 2: a study where you gather together two large groups of
Speaker 2: people who you think are identical on every variable you
Speaker 2: can imagine, age, weight, lifestyle, social class. Have one group
Speaker 2: eat their normal diet and have the other eat something
Speaker 2: you think is way healthier, and then follow them for
Speaker 2: years and see what happens. That's what Ivan Frantz suggests
Speaker 2: to his friend from the National Institutes of Health, and.
Speaker 3: He said, well, that's very interesting, because I have a
Speaker 3: summer message from a couple of other people who will
Speaker 3: just do that.
Speaker 2: The result was the National Diet Heart Study, a massive
Speaker 2: undertaking starting in the early nineteen sixties one hundred thousand
Speaker 2: people Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Oakland, and eventually Minnesota. France faced
Speaker 2: a challenge, though even clinical trials are not perfect, because
Speaker 2: how can you be sure that the group chosen to
Speaker 2: eat the normal diet doesn't start to eat healthier on
Speaker 2: their own overtime, or that the people chosen to eat
Speaker 2: healthy keep to their diet. How do you know they
Speaker 2: aren't sneaking big slices of chocolate cake every night. So
Speaker 2: alone among the participants in the National Diet Heart Study,
Speaker 2: Ivan France goes one step further because he's mister meticulous.
Speaker 2: He says, for my portion of the study in Minnesota,
Speaker 2: I'm going to use people who are living in an institution,
Speaker 2: so I know exactly what they're eating.
Speaker 3: Well, what I finally decided though, on was the school
Speaker 3: for people with low IQs down Ferrebou. Yes. So everybody
Speaker 3: else wanted to do it in the open population, and
Speaker 3: I said, well, you get a lot better control it
Speaker 3: in the close population. And so what they finally did
Speaker 3: was let me do it the way I wanted to,
Speaker 3: and the other five people do it in the open population.
Speaker 2: The patients in France's study would go for their meals
Speaker 2: in the cafeteria and get one of two trays. They'd
Speaker 2: look completely identical, so nobody knew what side of the
Speaker 2: experiment they were on. The term researchers used for that
Speaker 2: is double blind. But one tray was food cooked with
Speaker 2: vegetable oil and everything low fat. The other had everything
Speaker 2: cooked in saturated fat. Once I got butter, once I
Speaker 2: got margarine, And even that little detail France made perfect.
Speaker 3: At that time, there was a law in Minnesota that
Speaker 3: margarine had to be cut in triangles. I remember that.
Speaker 3: Remember that, sure so would look as good as the
Speaker 3: little butter. That was a big problem for me in
Speaker 3: my institutional study because that would have racked my double
Speaker 3: Aha and so funny you think I did about that?
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're a bright fellow.
Speaker 3: What did you do? I got a little wall pass
Speaker 3: the legislature. Let me cut my margins from the squares.
Speaker 2: Like I said, mystery meticulous.
Speaker 3: This was a beautiful organized study. There was lots of
Speaker 3: money and nothing. No holes were barre to try to
Speaker 3: do a good job.
Speaker 2: The Minnesota portion of the heart study took years to
Speaker 2: set up. It involved six different mental hospitals around Minnesota
Speaker 2: and one nursing home for a total of more than
Speaker 2: nine thousand research subjects. It ran for five years from
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty eight to nineteen seventy three, with a long
Speaker 2: follow up period. To this day, it stands as one
Speaker 2: of the most rigorous diet trials ever conducted.
Speaker 1: The different state hospitals where this project was conducted were
Speaker 1: scattered around Minnesota, and so my father would he actually
Speaker 1: had a small airplane, was a private pilot, and would
Speaker 1: this puddle jump around from one little place to another,
Speaker 1: troubleshooting these issues. It consumed his life and he sort
Speaker 1: of rarely took vacation and was always working on something,
Speaker 1: and it was just that what he wanted to do.
Speaker 2: Really, So what does the Minnesota study show, Well, that
Speaker 2: was the problem. The patients on the vegetable oil diet
Speaker 2: did end up with lower cholesterol than the people who
Speaker 2: ate food cooked with animal fats. That part worked according
Speaker 2: to expectation, but the vegetable oil people didn't live longer,
Speaker 2: which made no sense. They were eating the kind of
Speaker 2: diet everyone believed should help you live longer. Ivan France
Speaker 2: brought in a graduate student named Steve Brosty to help
Speaker 2: crunch the data. Brosty remembers everyone just be baffled.
Speaker 5: And they were hoping that with some new statistical techniques
Speaker 5: that had just come out, that they might be able
Speaker 5: to either understand why the results came out the way
Speaker 5: they did, or perhaps after some adjustments for various explanatory factors,
Speaker 5: that maybe the results would change.
Speaker 2: The results didn't change. When Brosty talked to Ivan Franz,
Speaker 2: France just shook his head.
Speaker 5: I remember him just expressing his bewilderment at how this
Speaker 5: could possibly have happened.
Speaker 2: Brosty wrote up his results for his master's thesis, but
Speaker 2: he never published it. In nineteen eighty nine, fifteen years
Speaker 2: after the Minnesota experiment ended, Ivan France finally published his results,
Speaker 2: but the paper was vague and didn't really go into detail,
Speaker 2: as if after thinking it over for fifteen years, he
Speaker 2: still couldn't make sense of what happened. This was a
Speaker 2: man who never ate butter who regularly checked the lipid
Speaker 2: levels of his children's blood. This was what he believed.
Speaker 2: In to test that belief, he spent years and millions
Speaker 2: of dollars designing the perfect clinical trial, perfect one step
Speaker 2: beyond everyone else in the National Diet Heart Study. And
Speaker 2: after all that the results were equivocal, he put a
Speaker 2: box full of all of his old data in his basement.
Speaker 2: Because he didn't believe in throwing anything out. He retired.
Speaker 2: He died in two thousand and nine, and his study
Speaker 2: was all but forgotten for a quarter century until Ivan
Speaker 2: Franz's son Robert, got a call out of the blue
Speaker 2: from Christopher Ramsden.
Speaker 4: It's pretty fun to try and track down missing data,
Speaker 4: so one clue led to another.
Speaker 2: Christopher Ramsden is a researcher at the National Institutes of Health.
Speaker 2: For seven years, he served as a Lieutenant commander in
Speaker 2: the Commissioned Corps of the US Public Health Service. He
Speaker 2: comes to the field of diet research from a different
Speaker 2: perspective than the majority of his peers. Ivan Frantz or
Speaker 2: Enseil Keys were interested in the effects of saturated fats.
Speaker 2: If you eat lots of butter, what happens to you?
Speaker 2: Ramsden is interested in the effects of the thing we
Speaker 2: are replacing butter with vegetable oils corn oil, sunflower oil,
Speaker 2: grape seed oil, canola oil, margarine. These are probably unsaturated fats,
Speaker 2: and they're all rich in something called linolaic acid.
Speaker 4: So for perspective, if you were to eat corn, you know,
Speaker 4: corn is about one percent of it by weight is fat,
Speaker 4: Whereas if you eat corn oil, it's one hundred percent
Speaker 4: of fat, and about fifty five to sixty percent of
Speaker 4: that is one compound linelaic acid. So I kind of
Speaker 4: view things like corn oil as kind of a cross
Speaker 4: between a food and a dietary supplement.
Speaker 2: Human beings need at least some linelaic acid for nutritional purposes,
Speaker 2: but in our attempt to keep our hearts healthier, we've
Speaker 2: essentially started to put vegetable oils in everything. Ramsen estimates
Speaker 2: that up until one hundred years ago, human beings would
Speaker 2: have gotten roughly two to three percent of their calories
Speaker 2: from linelaic acid. Now we're eating three, four, even five
Speaker 2: times that much. And the thing about linelaic acid is
Speaker 2: it's not benign. It builds up in certain tissues, it
Speaker 2: may play a role in inflammation. So what does it
Speaker 2: mean that we've suddenly decided to consume large quantities of
Speaker 2: something so problematic?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think it's fair to say we're performing sort
Speaker 4: of an uncontrolled human experiment.
Speaker 2: Ramsen wanted some way to compare the health of people
Speaker 2: who eat lots of linelaic acid with people who eat
Speaker 2: a traditional diet of almost no linelaic acid. But what
Speaker 2: was he going to do? Somehow convinced the government to
Speaker 2: give him hundreds of millions of dollars for the study
Speaker 2: and then find thousands of people willing to turn their
Speaker 2: diets upside down. Then he realizes, wait, those studies have
Speaker 2: already been done. In all of the mountains of data
Speaker 2: collected half a century ago in the name of studying cholesterol,
Speaker 2: there should be an answer to the linelaic acid question.
Speaker 2: Ramsden first comes across something called the Sydney Diet Heart Study,
Speaker 2: the Australian counterpart to the big heart studies that were
Speaker 2: going on in the United States at the same time.
Speaker 2: He needs the raw data, but the studies main authors
Speaker 2: are long dead. One of the research assistants on the project, though,
Speaker 2: is still alive. Ramsen tracks him down. I think you
Speaker 2: know what happens next.
Speaker 4: So these data were actually in the house, I believe
Speaker 4: in the attic of influencing Lelar Thapen, who was a
Speaker 4: research assistant at the time of the study, who went
Speaker 4: on to have a prominent career and got his PhD
Speaker 4: and luckily had the foresight to hold on to this
Speaker 4: nine track magnetic tape.
Speaker 2: The attic tapes are exactly what Ramsden is looking for,
Speaker 2: but the Sydney study is small, four hundred and fifty
Speaker 2: eight people, all middle aged men, and it wasn't done
Speaker 2: in a controlled environment. That's when Ramsden calls Robert Franz
Speaker 2: and asks him to go rooting through his father's files
Speaker 2: to get his hands on the Minnesota experiment, the mother
Speaker 2: of all diet studies.
Speaker 1: You know, at a certain point universities make a decision
Speaker 1: to throw things out that they think are just taking
Speaker 1: up space and nobody's going to do anything with them anymore,
Speaker 1: and what's the value in preserving all these old things?
Speaker 1: And so it turns out that my father felt that
Speaker 1: was just a huge mistake, that why would you ever
Speaker 1: throw away the raw data?
Speaker 2: And sure enough, there they were on magnetic tapes in
Speaker 2: a moldering box in the back of the France basement.
Speaker 2: Chris must have been sharing with you the results that
Speaker 2: they were doing the work. How actively he engaged with you?
Speaker 2: Was he when he was working through the data?
Speaker 1: Well, when they started getting to a point where they
Speaker 1: had kind of dug this analysis of the people who
Speaker 1: had been on the diet for more than a year
Speaker 1: and who were over sixty five, which was then showing
Speaker 1: a trend towards this finding that the more their cholesterol
Speaker 1: was lowered, the higher the risk of an adverse outcome.
Speaker 2: Adverse outcome the great medical euphemism for death.
Speaker 1: Then he called me up and says, Bob, this is
Speaker 1: a little controversial, perhaps because it's suggesting that there might
Speaker 1: actually be an adverse effect in some of these people
Speaker 1: of this diet.
Speaker 2: With the basement tapes, Ramsden could now drill down into
Speaker 2: the specifics of the trial, and what he found was
Speaker 2: that people over sixty five, the most vulnerable people in
Speaker 2: the experiment, were dying faster if they ate a so
Speaker 2: called healthy diet. The reanalysis of the Sydney trial, by
Speaker 2: the way, reached the same conclusion vegetable oil lowers your cholesterol,
Speaker 2: which is, of course it's a good thing. But now
Speaker 2: Ramsden had two bits of evidence showing that all that
Speaker 2: extra linelaic acid seemed to be doing something else, something
Speaker 2: that more than canceled out all the other benefits of
Speaker 2: vegetable oil. If you listened to the previous episode of
Speaker 2: revisionist History, you heard me complaining about how McDonald's ruined
Speaker 2: French fries. They used to cook them in animal fat
Speaker 2: and they were divine, but then in nineteen ninety they
Speaker 2: switched to frying them in vegetable oils, and that's why
Speaker 2: they now taste like cardboard. We had to give up
Speaker 2: on one of the most delicious foods ever because we
Speaker 2: were told it was better for us. Healthier saturated fats
Speaker 2: were bad. Look in your kitchen. Look at how much
Speaker 2: vegetable oil you have in your cupboard. Your ancestors did
Speaker 2: not have big bottles of corn oil lying around. But
Speaker 2: now Ramsden comes along and says, wait a minute, the
Speaker 2: basement tape suggests that stuff is not so healthy after all.
Speaker 2: Linilaic acid might be a real problem. Let me just
Speaker 2: read to you from the conclusion of Ramsden's research article
Speaker 2: on the Minnesota study. It's in the British Medical Journal.
Speaker 2: And remember that this is a super cautious scientist speaking
Speaker 2: in the final paragraphs of a peer reviewed research paper
Speaker 2: that was probably rewritten and rewritten ten times to tone
Speaker 2: it down as much as possible. It concludes available evidence
Speaker 2: from randomized controlled trials shows that replacement of saturated fat
Speaker 2: with linnoleic acid effectively lowers serum cholesterol, but does not
Speaker 2: support the hypothesis that this translates to a lower risk
Speaker 2: of death from cornerary heart disease or all causes. He's saying,
Speaker 2: there's no good evidence that reducing saturated fat makes you
Speaker 2: live longer. The best clinical trials we have reached the
Speaker 2: opposite conclusion. That's why Ramsden calls up Ivan Franz's son
Speaker 2: before he publishes his findings.
Speaker 1: He has to, so he said, how do you feel
Speaker 1: about that? This could be a little bit sensitive for
Speaker 1: you because this is your father's life work, and maybe
Speaker 1: in some situations it didn't actually have a neutral effect.
Speaker 1: Perhaps it wasn't even good for people.
Speaker 2: It's not a trivial issue for either man, is it.
Speaker 2: Ramsden is challenging fifty years of medical orthodoxy, and he'd
Speaker 2: enlisted the son of the very men who helped create
Speaker 2: that orthodoxy. Ramsen tells Robert Franz, I am about to
Speaker 2: call in to question your father's life's work, to show
Speaker 2: that something he believed in his whole career perhaps wasn't
Speaker 2: that good for people. How do you feel about that?
Speaker 2: Which means have I made you complicit in the betrayal
Speaker 2: of your own father? And what does France say? This
Speaker 2: is the heart of it. Franz says, no, I'm not
Speaker 2: betraying my father. If my father were alive, he would
Speaker 2: have done the same thing, rummaged through his basement and
Speaker 2: given you the same computer tapes.
Speaker 1: I think my father would be very pleased, because that's science, right.
Speaker 1: You have a hypothesis, you try to test it. Maybe
Speaker 1: it's dogmnt breaking, maybe it's not. And if things go
Speaker 1: a different direction, then you've got to try to explain
Speaker 1: that my father was a humble man. You know, he
Speaker 1: would not be quick to take a lot of credit
Speaker 1: for things.
Speaker 2: Ivan France had a set of beliefs opinions. He thought
Speaker 2: you lived longer if you lowered your cholesterol. He thought
Speaker 2: that a healthy diet was one rich in vegetable oils
Speaker 2: and low in saturated fats. He believed in margarine and
Speaker 2: not butter. Those were the beliefs that drove his research agenda.
Speaker 2: But what Robert Franz is talking about when he says
Speaker 2: my father was a humble man is something far more
Speaker 2: crucial than belief. He's talking about his father's prince the
Speaker 2: foundation of his father's thinking. Ivan Franz's foundational principle was humility.
Speaker 2: He was fully prepared to accept at any given moment
Speaker 2: that his beliefs might not be right and that he
Speaker 2: might not know the answer. In helping to prove his
Speaker 2: father wrong, the son was upholding his father's memory. When
Speaker 2: I interviewed Robert Franz, I had just lost my father
Speaker 2: three days before. That's why I was at home in Canada.
Speaker 2: I was going to cancel the interview, but in the
Speaker 2: end that seemed as much trouble as doing it. So
Speaker 2: I sat in my rental car on my cell phone,
Speaker 2: and as Robert Franz talked about his father, it seemed
Speaker 2: to me that he was describing my father as well.
Speaker 2: Graham Morris, Leslie Gladwell, an academic, a mathematician, slender, a
Speaker 2: full head of hair. He would sit at his desk
Speaker 2: at home and write his mathematics papers in elegant longhanir
Speaker 2: and pencil eraser all just so. Maybe if my father
Speaker 2: hadn't just died, I wouldn't have made that connection. But
Speaker 2: then and there it seemed inescapable and the more I listened,
Speaker 2: the more I realized that France was talking about things
Speaker 2: that I had been thinking about as well. What is
Speaker 2: a child's obligation to his parent? I took my father's
Speaker 2: presence for granted for as long as he was alive,
Speaker 2: and when he died, the first shocking realization was that
Speaker 2: I had to find a way to keep him alive
Speaker 2: in my heart, to honor his memory. How do we
Speaker 2: do that? Not by honoring our parents beliefs. We are
Speaker 2: different people than they are, born in different eras, shaped
Speaker 2: by different forces. What we are obliged to honor in
Speaker 2: our parents is their principles, the rules by which they
Speaker 2: lived their lives. That's what I found so beautiful in
Speaker 2: Robert Franz's act, The busy professional, a doctor at one
Speaker 2: of the most prestigious medical centers in the world, drove
Speaker 2: ninety miles each way four times to spend hours alone
Speaker 2: in a cluttered basement looking for a box of tapes
Speaker 2: that would end up proving that his father was wrong.
Speaker 2: And why did he do it? Because he understood that
Speaker 2: in pushing the science forward, in defiance of ego and preconception,
Speaker 2: he was upholding the principles by which his father had lived.
Speaker 2: There is something impossibly beautiful about that act. In my grief,
Speaker 2: it has given me solace. Revision's History is produced by
Speaker 2: Mei LaBelle and Jacob Smith, with Camille Baptista, Stephanie Daniel,
Speaker 2: and Ciomara Martinez White. Our editor is Julia Barton. Lawn
Speaker 2: Williams is our engineer. Original music by Luis Sciera. Special
Speaker 2: thanks to Andy Bauers and Jacob Weisberger Panople. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.