This experience in the calorimeter at Middletown was very significant and instructive. The author was the first test-subject used in the newly completed calorimeter. The oxygen-measuring attachment of Dr. Benedict that completed the apparatus and gave a complete trial balance of the metabolism of the subject under examination was as yet untried, but it proved its integrity within the fraction of one per cent and registered as accurately as necessary for all practical purposes. So much for the machine; but it measured a result which is of the greatest importance to the human race. The author had just demonstrated the possibility of running the human machine on half the heat, on one-third of the fuel, and with only one-tenth of the waste, as represented by the waste, or ashes of digestion. Not only was this done while in pursuit of the ordinary activity of present-day life, but under stress of ’Varsity-Crew exercise, as reported by Professor Chittenden and Dr. Anderson. Had this demonstration been made relative to steam engines or electrical motors, the information would have been revolutionary in establishing new values for things industrial and commercial.
Its significance relative to human profitable possibilities is even more important than if related to steam or electrical power. The possibility of economy in the human machine gives also a hope of immunity from the common diseases which now afflict mankind.
The trial of the calorimeter as a measuring machine and the trial balance of the economic metabolism which the author had attained by five years of careful attention to the natural requirements of nutrition were epoch-making events coincidently related, and for them the author here makes this distinguished claim—not on account of any accomplishment of himself, but as a promise of great possibilities for human betterment.
Here follows a reproduction of the plan just referred to, with fac-simile of the signatures of the distinguished physiologists who approved the plan and consented to serve as “Assessors.” To this list should have been added the name of Professor Ozawa, professor of physiology at the University of Tokio, Japan; but time and distance did not permit gaining the required understanding and assent. Professor Ozawa’s connection with the inquiry would make it not only international but interhemispherical and interracial as well, and this possibility of scientific coördination and coöperation is typical of the harmonising wave that is fast enveloping the earth for the benefit of mankind.
I give a copy of the document entire, with estimates of cost, etc., just as it was originally drawn and intended only as a trial suggestion, to be modified by circumstances.—Horace Fletcher.]
PROPOSAL TO FOUND AN INTERNATIONAL LABORATORY OF RESEARCH FOR THE STUDY OF NUTRITION IN ALL ITS ASPECTS
Notwithstanding the enormous development which the study of Experimental Physiology has undergone during the last half-century, and the constant multiplication of physiological laboratories fitted in a manner which enables them to be used as places of research as well as of instruction in the methods of physiological inquiry, it has appeared to many physiologists that a great need remains to be supplied by the establishment of an International Laboratory of Research, devoted primarily, if not exclusively, to the investigation of problems connected with the Nutrition of the Animal, and particularly of Human Organisms,—studies particularly, and in the first instance, from the point of view of the relation of the food consumed by the animal body to its output of energy, either in the form of heat or mechanical work.
The reason for establishing such a laboratory, available for the use of investigations of all nations, is to be found in the fact that the researches which are now called for, in order to place upon a firm foundation our knowledge of food and its relations to the activity of the organism, necessitates an assemblage of apparatus and machinery so specialised and so costly that they are not to be found collected together even in the best equipped of the physiological laboratories of Europe or America, which all subserve in the first instance the purposes of systematic instruction. Undoubtedly, unquestionably, certain of the great and costly appliances of research are to be found in particular laboratories, as, for instance, in those of Berlin, Munich, Paris, and Turin, but there certainly exists no laboratory in which the investigator can find assembled under one roof all the specially fitted chemical, physical, and even bacteriological appliances which he may need to employ in the investigation of the Phenomena of Nutrition.
A more precise conception of the nature of the proposed laboratory may be formed if reference is made to certain groups of appliances which such a laboratory should possess and be able to place at the disposal of the scientific men coming to it for facilities which may be denied them at home. It should possess a complete set of respiration chambers of various types, and especially should be provided with the “Atwater Respiration Apparatus;” the most perfect appliances for the analyses of gases should be available; it should be provided with the most perfect calorimeters of various types, both for the investigation of the calorimetric value of the foods experimented on, and for the determination of the heat produced by man or by the lower animals,—the subjects of observation. The laboratory should possess, besides, the most perfect appliances for the measurement of work done by man and by animals (“ergostat,” “ergograph”), and a set of balances of the highest perfection capable of weighing with accuracy very heavy loads. These characteristic appliances of a laboratory specially designed for placing our knowledge of Animal Nutrition on a thoroughly sound basis must be superadded to the ordinary means for pursuing with success researches in Pure Organic, Physiological, and Physical Chemistry, as well as in Bacteriology.