Wilbur Atwater, Respiration Calorimetry, and the Science of Nutrition in the United States

Time: 12:00 - 1:00 p.m.

Place: 6th Floor Conference Room, Chemical Heritage Foundation

Information: 215-873-8289 or bbl@chemheritage.org

As a professor of agricultural chemistry and a government administrator and researcher, Wilbur Atwater played a pivotal role in the emergence of a science of human nutrition in the United States. In addition to conducting important field surveys of what and how much Americans were eating at the end of the 19th century, he performed groundbreaking laboratory work involving the chemistry of foods and metabolism. Employing the thermodynamic approach of his German teachers, Atwater built his lab around a large, expensive, and complex instrument-the respiration calorimeter. This instrument, whose operation required a team of skilled specialists from various fields, allowed for the accurate measurement of the income and outgo of matter and energy in human experimental subjects. In my lecture I will discuss Atwater and his work, focusing on his transnational exchange of scientific ideas, practices, and instruments, as well as the political and economic contexts in which he was embedded.