35 



Revelle: Yes. So our major activities in the end, in the last year 

 that I was director, were basically these resource studies, 

 although Bob Reppeto was working on the factors controlling 

 population growth. So was Harvey Leibenstein. Harold 

 Thomas more or less dropped out toward the end. He felt 

 that he didn't have much more to contribute. 



One of the important sort of side aspects of the 

 center was the work that Rose Frisch did. She was the wife 

 of a professor of physics at MIT, a very feisty, feminist 

 gal. I brought her in essentially because she was looking 

 ■ for something to do in the very first days of the center. 

 So we made her a research associate. I'm not even sure we 

 paid her at first, but we eventually did. 



In the middle 1960s the President's Science Advisory 

 Committee started the World Food Study, and I was a member 

 of the panel that was given that job. It was headed by Ivan 

 Bennett,- who later became vice president of NYU for all 

 their medical sciences. He was assistant director of the 

 Office of Science and Technology in the White House. 



The parts that I was responsible for were basically 

 two things. One was the amount of agricultural land, what 

 was the actual potential of agricultural land, where was it, 

 how much was it, how much could be developed. A group of us 

 wrote a report on that, where I did a lot of the work and 

 was the principal author of the report. 



The other thing that we worked on was nutrition, what 

 did people need to eat and how much did they need to eat. 

 Part of that problem was how big were they? Little people 

 don't need as much to eat as big people. I got Rose 

 interested in this problem, and we wrote one of the papers 

 for the study on body size and nutritional requirements for 

 people of different sizes. 



It turned out, for example, that Bengalis are quite 

 small. The average Bengali male only weighs about 100 

 pounds, and the average female weighs about 90 pounds. They 

 don't really need anywhere near as much to eat as the Sikhs, 

 for example, who weigh on the average 160 or 170 pounds, and 

 the women are about as big as the men. 



I don't quite remember what this study consisted of, 

 but it was basically a study of the requirements of the 

 different populations, the food requirements in terms of 

 numbers, age distribution, sex distribution, and body size. 



This led Rose, then, to a further study of the 

 relationship between body composition and fertility. She 

 developed the hypothesis that women who don't have enough 

 fat on their bones in proportion to body weight are 

 infertile. It's quite clear with anorexic women; they don't 

 even menstruate. But even women who are not anorexic but 

 don't have the right proportion of body fat often don't 

 menstruate either. For example, women athletes don't 

 menstruate. They have too much muscle compared to the fat 

 content of their body. She has developed this hypothesis 



