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