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

A National Research Council fellowship brought Ancel to Europe for two years
and he had the good fortune to study Physiology under the Danish Nobel
Laureate in Medicine, Professor August Krogh, in Copenhagen. From
Copenhagen Ancel moved on to Cambridge where he took his second
doctorate, in Physiology, at King’s College in 1936. Although Ancel enjoyed
his time in Cambridge, itchy feet meant another move after graduation, even
though he was offered a permanent position at Cambridge University.
Harvard tempted Ancel with a position at their Fatigue Laboratory, and the
funds to carry out large-scale research. He only stayed one year at Harvard,
however, and most of that time he spent on an Andean mountaintop
investigating the effects of altitude on himself and his colleagues. After
Harvard he moved on to the University of Minnesota in 1937 where he was
eventually to set up an entire Laboratory of Physiological Hygiene to research
themes connected to the effects of diet and exercise on the human body. In
1939 he married the biochemist Margaret Harvey with whom he remained
for the rest of his life. Margaret died in 2006. He had married once before, at
the age of 19, but this marriage had ended in divorce after only a few years.
When war came Ancel developed the K ration (K as in Keys) for US soldiers
and carried out the famous Minnesota Semi-Starvation Study on conscientious
objectors to investigate the effects of malnutrition.This large study resulted in
the influential two-volume work entitled The Biology of Human Starvation
published in 1950.The experiment was more than a scholastic exercise, it was
set up in anticipation of the large-scale relief efforts that were going to be
necessary after the end of the war.
When Ancel studied the data coming from actual starvation in war-torn
Europe, he noticed the interesting fact that the death rate from coronary
diseases decreased when food intake was reduced.This led him to study the
relationship between diet and heart conditions on a group of businessmen
from Minnesota and St Paul. From this study Ancel started suspecting that
high blood cholesterol levels could be linked to the amount of fat in the
diet. This suspicion was strengthened as Ancel carried out fieldwork in
Europe and Japan, and by the findings of his wife Margaret, who studied the
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OBITUARIES