Part 2 (Obituaries) - King's College - University of Cambridge

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OBITUARIES
benefits of the “Mediterranean diet” became known all around the world.
Ancel himself lived as he preached, eating a diet of pasta, bread, olive oil,
fruits and vegetables, with meat, fish and dairy products used as condiments.
He liked to remark that his own great age had proved him right, although
admitting, as the rigorous scientist he was, that there was no definite proof.
Ancel’s first foray into the world of science was not as successful as he might
have wished. On his eighth birthday he tried to chloroform a fly but, to the
shock of his grandmother, he only managed to render himself unconscious.
He was born to teenage parents in Colorado Springs in 1904, who soon
after his birth moved west to San Francisco.After the earthquake of 1906 the
family moved to Berkeley, where Ancel grew up. A quiet life in Berkeley at
the beginning of the century was far too sedentary for the young and
inquisitive boy.
As a teenager Ancel ran away from home and tried his hand at shovelling bat
guano in Arizona caves and digging gold in Colorado, as well as for a time
becoming a lumberjack. He did return to Berkeley to study in 1922, but his
chemistry studies could not quell his impatience. Before graduating he signed
up as an oiler on the ocean liner SS President Wilson bound for China. Maybe it
was on board the ship that Ancel’s interest in human physiology and the
effects of different diets was first awoken. As he related afterwards, he hardly
ate anything solid during the trip, subsisting instead mainly on alcohol.
The life of Ancel until the mid 1920s reads as though it had been written by
his fellow Californian Jack London. Upon returning to the USA, Ancel did,
however, settle down to somewhat less adventurous and impulsive exploits
than those with which he had begun his adult life. He continued studying at
Berkeley, but switched to Economics and Political Science.After gaining his BA
he worked briefly as a management trainee at Woolworth’s before impatience
once more got the better of him and he returned to UC Berkeley to study for
an MSc in Zoology, a degree he completed in only six months. He continued
to study for a PhD which he eventually gained in 1930 from the Scripps
Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, conducting research in
Oceanography and Biology.