Fifty years of experience in nutrition and a look to the future. I. Foods and nutrition through fifty years.

ERHAPS an ideal concept for celebrating a Golden Anniversary is to review the past 50 years and then to challenge our vision of what to strive for during the next 50 years. By coincidence it was just 50 years ago, almost to a day, in 1917, when I first heard of the mysterious things called "vitamines," while a student at Washington State College. Literary societies were an important part of college life in those days. No dances were permitted except on Saturday evenings, but cultural activities such as literary societies were permitted on Friday evenings. At one of these meetings a senior in agriculture gave a really exciting talk on the work of Lunin, Eijkman, Hopkins, McCollum, Osborne, and Mendel. He impressed all of us by his declaration that evidently all of our food and feed supplies would have to be restudied, both on a chemical and on a biological basis, and this was going to take a long time. How right he tion chemist, trained at the University of Wisconsin, asked me to prepare a demonstration of vitamin-deficient albino rats for their annual extension course for farmers. The rat demonstration was sheer joy compared to the next assignment. In a small room with hoods that did not function very well, I had to digest several dozen thyroid glands from sheep, in fused sodium hydroxide over Bunsen burners, as a first step in iodine analysis. The fumes repeatedly drove me out of the laboratory, thoroughly nauseated. However, this experience had an intense personal interest because it marked the turning point in solving the goiter problem in my home community in the Columbia River Valley. The incidence of human goiter was very high, including my older sister and many neighbors, and among livestock there was a serious problem of big necked sheep, hairless pigs, and weak or stillborn colts and calves. The animal problem was solved quickly, but the human one moved much more slowly. Although Professor Matthews, then at the University of Cincinnati, was not