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