History of the USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University.

The Jean Mayer United States Department of Agriculture Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging (HNRCA) at Tufts University, although quite a mouthful, is aptly named because it has contributed substantially to the legacy of Jean Mayer, to the scientific stature of the USDA, and, in Atwater’s tradition, to the Department’s contributions to human nutrition. At the same time, the Center has pioneered in embedding of concepts of aging within the human nutrition and health agenda while elevating the stature of Tufts University with a signature program in nutrition and health science. The establishment of the HNRCA, with its 15 stories of research space on the Health Sciences campus of Tufts University in Boston, with its scientific staff of 300, and with its accrual of.7000 alumni of its studies on human nutrition (thus making it the largest center on nutrition and aging in the world), has a history that is embedded in both domestic and international developments, especially in the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. Those were rich decades in the history of nutrition and nutrition science in this country, and in many ways the establishment of the HNRCA in 1978 was a culmination of some of those events. To tell the HNRCA story, let me start with a narrative about hunger in America as a backdrop. In the tumultuous decade of the 1960s, one of the most active and productive elements of the U.S. government in nutrition was the work of the Interdepartmental Committee on Nutrition for National Defense, whose history has been well recorded in a previous symposium in these Experimental Biology meetings and published in The Journal of Nutrition (1). For our purposes, it is worth noting that the Interdepartmental Committee was a prominent nutrition survey and research program that evolved during the 1960s from performing nutrition surveys in developing countries to forming the basis for the TenState Survey in this country. That survey demonstrated emphatically that poverty and hunger existed in unacceptable dimensions in this country (2), not just in developing nations of the Third World. The report of the Ten-State Survey on Hunger in America forged an important relation between Jean Mayer and the Kennedy brothers, Robert and Edward. Mayer, then a professor in the department of nutrition in Harvard’s School of Public Health, utilized his participation in a National Coalition Against Hunger, which involved 66 million citizens, including labor unions, welfare rights organizations, etc., to persuade President Richard Nixon, who had marginally defeated Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 election, to improve his credentials with domestic liberal and social causes by hosting the first (and to this day only) White House Conference on Nutrition in 1969. Mayer was seconded to the government to chair and plan that conference, which arguably has had a greater impact on the nutritional policy history of this country than any other single event. Out of that conference came such social programs as Food Stamps, a sharp enlargement of the Women’s, Infants’ and Children’s Nutrition Program, nutrition labeling with a sharply increased attention to the relation between nutrition and chronic disease, such as heart disease, and an increased realization that nutrition research could play a major role in health sciences and disease prevention as well as in the fight against poverty and hunger. A major vehicle for the translation of the some of the 800 recommendations of the 1969 White House Conference on Nutrition was the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and National Needs, which was chaired by Senator George McGovern (D-SD), with a minority cochair Senator Robert Dole (R-KS) (both would later run for president of the United States) (3). This was a time of escalating interest in nutrition and disease, leading to some consideration of additional means of enlarging the nutrition science and research capability of the U.S. government. At that time, nutrition research in the U.S. government was represented by the Beltsville Human Nutrition Laboratory within the USDA, a small intramural program in human nutrition research at the NIH, largely in the National Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic Diseases, and small laboratories in the Food Division of the FDA. The USDA had responded to mandates from Congress to establish a second Human Nutrition Research Center in the wheat-growing heartland, and that became the laboratory in Grand Forks, North Dakota. Harold Sandstead, its first director, can also take credit for later having advised Jean Mayer on some of the pathways and mechanisms that could lead to enlargement of the USDA nutrition centers program. Because interest in human nutrition science and its potential benefits to human health was still very strong, especially in the Senate Select Committee, they produced a report on national nutrition goals (4), which roiled the food and nutrition policy landscape (a history worthy of its own symposium), and has been succeeded by the Dietary Guidelines for Americans and the Food Guide Pyramid. 1 Published as a supplement to The Journal of Nutrition. Presented as part of the symposium ‘‘History of Nutrition: Legacy of Wilbur O. Atwater: Human Nutrition Research Expansion in USDA’’ given at the 2007 Experimental Biology meeting on April 30, 2007, in Washington, DC. The symposium was sponsored by the American Society for Nutrition. The symposium was chaired by Jackie Dupont. 2 Author disclosure: I. H. Rosenberg, no conflicts of interest. * To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: irwin.rosenberg@ tufts.edu.