Stone Knives and Bearskins, Madison Style

I was reminded recently of the author, Paul de Kruif - one of his most popular books was called: Microbe Hunters which I read as a kid.  

https://archive.org/search?query=microbe+hunters+de+kruif&sin=  (you can tell it was a popular book by all the copies on archive !)

Hunger Fighters was another of de Kruif's books and has a Wisconsin connection in the last three chapters:

https://archive.org/search?query=hunger+fighters+de+kruif&sin=

I made it through four years of college at UWM (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) with an Electrical Engineering degree.  But the University of Wisconsin at Madison is the biggest school in the state and arguably the best.  It has a long history of accomplishment.  One of the tellers of those tales of UW history is Professor Dave Nelson.  Here is one of Prof. Nelson's lectures on PBS Wisconsin:

source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0axP7Hq6HzQ  (Tom Zinnen must be a dad because he does tell dad jokes :)

In this lecture Dr. Nelson mentions Babcock, Steenbock and Goldberger who are the subjects of the last three parts of Hunger Fighters.

One of Dr. Nelson's other lectures references Hunger Fighters but unfortunately I can't find it online - some of his videos are on PBS.org.  Breathless prose, florid, exclamatory ?  All these terms might be applied to de Kruif's writing but they were popular and readable.

Stone Knives and Bearskins:

  

source: https://youtu.be/F226oWBHvvI

Basically that's what they had to work with at UW Madison over a century ago.  But they did the famous single grain experiment with cows and then proceeded to use rats to isolate vitamins like Niacin - amazing.  Without Niacin (and other vitamins that we take for granted) you are in BIG trouble !

BTW there are lots of Wednesday Night at the Lab lectures on Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/@wednesdaynitethelab8948/videos

Here is another lecture by Dr. Nelson on the Wisconsin Hunger Fighters:

source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36vWWV88rqU


If you want to skip the course boilerplate go to about 12 minutes in.  He does mention de Kruif's book, Hunger Fighters at about 42 minutes into the video.

Best Regards,
Chuck, WB9KZY
http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm