NUTRITION LABORATORY.* 



Francis G. Benedict, Director. 



During the year the Nutrition Laboratory has had to modify its 

 experimental procedures considerably, as a result of changes in person- 

 nel, loss of specially trained assistants, non-delivery of apparatus, and 

 the pressing need of important economic problems. In the belief that 

 the research character of the Institution should be retained so far as 

 possible, every effort has been made to minimize procedures that would 

 tend to convert the Laboratory prematurely into a testing or control 

 station. The entire cessation of abstract research in most of the 

 countries at war and the reduction in the amount of time available for 

 research in the European neutral countries make it more and more 

 important to continue our investigations as far as possible. 



A misconception has naturally arisen with regard to the functions of 

 this Laboratory, owing probably to the name attached to the Labora- 

 tory from its estabhshment. The designation "Nutrition Laboratory" 

 was selected in the belief that the fundamental laws governing vital 

 activity are the scientific bases of nutrition. That the first decade of 

 the existence of this Laboratory has passed without any extended 

 studies of the nutritional phases of the physiology of man, which are 

 understood under the popular term of "nutrition investigations," 

 is perhaps not surprising when it is stated that at the outset it was 

 clearly recognized that the economic and sociological phases of the 

 problems of nutrition were, we believed, more properly the province 

 of the admirable organization centralized in Washington in the Office 

 of Experiment Stations of the United States Department of Agri- 

 culture, which is in close touch with fifty or more important research 

 centers in the several experiment stations. This is especially true of 

 problems in nutrition in which the character of the diet, and atmos- 

 pheric, industrial, social, and racial environments play an important 

 role in the selection of food as well as the amount eaten. While this 

 phase of nutrition investigations was emphasized by the late Professor 

 W. 0. At water in connection with his research work at Wesleyan 

 University, Middletown, Connecticut, the establishment of the Nutri- 

 tion Laboratory permitted a complete divorce of the more abstractly 

 scientific phases of the problems of nutrition from the sociological and 

 economic phases. Consequently, at the present time, the Nutrition 

 Laboratory'- and its staff find themselves in great measure out of touch 

 with the economic and sociological phases of the question, and many 

 problems that would seem to be appropriately undertaken by this 

 Laboratory are quite outside of our field of practice. 



♦Situated in Boston, Massachusetts. 



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