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