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Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute and the University of California at Davis, Davis, CA
2To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: jking{at}chori.org.
Women have played a special role in the development of the field of human nutrition. Although the origin of nutrition as a science is usually dated from the work of Lavoisier about 200 years ago, the emergence of studies of human nutrient requirements coincides with the entry of women into the science in the early 1900s (1). Men also made important contributions to the early development of nutrition through their work in chemistry, physiological chemistry or biochemistry. These men trained and mentored the early women scientists at leading universities, such as Yale, Columbia, the University of Chicago or land-grant universities where the men held appointments in agricultural chemistry or animal sciences. Their female students, however, were encouraged to take positions in "women’s" departments, usually home economics or household science, or to work with federal programs dealing with foods, nutrition and household economics.
Given the origin of women in nutrition, it is not surprising that their careers and research differed from that of men. The pioneering women scientists tended to study issues about women and women’s concerns (i.e., children and food) (1). The bibliographies of many women nutrition scientists, even to the present time, primarily include papers about foods and nutritional needs of humans. There are several explanations for this link between women and human nutrition. First, they were frequently employed in situations where their colleagues and students were primarily women; these associates were readily available to serve as study subjects. Second, resources were always limiting. Laboratories and equipment were either donated from male-dominated departments and institutions or from philanthropy. Several major endowments available to women scientists supported research on women’s issues (1). The Merrill-Palmer School in Detroit, Michigan, funded by a $3 million gift from Lizzie Merrill Palmer, the widow of a U.S. Senator from Michigan, is an example. Female human nutritionists, such as Icie Macy Hoobler and Helen Hunscher, conducted much of the early work in maternal and child nutrition at this school.
This review focuses on the contributions of two women who played major roles in establishing the field of human nutrition through their careers at the University of California at Berkeley. Agnes Fay Morgan created a human nutrition research program at the University of California at Berkeley that was based on the fundamental principles of science and served as the first chair of what is now the Department of Nutritional Science. Dr. Doris Howes Calloway followed Dr. Morgan in that same department and moved the field of human nutrition from descriptive to hypothesis-testing studies. Dr. Calloway also played important roles in establishing the science of nutrition on the Berkeley campus. Both women studied at the University of Chicago for their doctoral degrees before taking a position at a land-grant university. Although their research established a foundation for the field of human nutrition, their studies focused primarily on "women’s issues."
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Agnes Fay Morgan (1884–1968) |
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 TOP Agnes Fay Morgan (1884-1968) Doris Howes Calloway (1923-2001)CONCLUSIONLITERATURE CITED |
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After finishing her MS degree, Agnes Fay taught chemistry in Montana for three years (2). This is where she met Arthur Ivason Morgan, a student in one of her chemistry classes. Arthur Morgan was four years older than she, having left his Oregon farm to fight in the Spanish-American War. He had been wounded and was receiving money that made college possible for him. After their marriage, Agnes Fay followed her husband to Seattle where she was an instructor at the University of Washington for three years. However, after noting that she was being passed over for promotions by younger men who had PhD degrees (2), her husband followed her back to the University of Chicago where she earned a PhD in organic chemistry in two years under Professor Stieglitz. At that time only 11% of the PhDs granted were earned by women (2), and Agnes Fay was probably the only married woman to received a doctoral degree in chemistry in the early 1900s.
Morgan’s professional career.
In 1915, Morgan accepted a faculty position in nutrition in the Department of Home Economics at Berkeley with an annual salary of $1800. This was about $600 lower than the salaries paid to male faculty with PhDs (2). Dr. Morgan quickly understood the academic culture at Berkeley, i.e., publishing in the "right" journals and attracting money for research were the keys to academic success. Therefore, her first and only child was not born until the year she was promoted to full professor, 1923. She was 39-years-old at the time. She kept her private family life separate from her work. Her pregnancy was concealed by her long lab coat, and her mother came to live with the new parents to provide childcare.
Dr. Morgan chaired the Department of Household Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley for 38 years, from 1916 to 54. Those years were full of challenges and conflicts for her as demonstrated by a quote from her own notes, "So I came to the University of California then, in January, 1915, and began giving courses in dietetics and nutrition, a subject I knew nothing about and nobody else knew much about at that time. I had to dig up the subject matter mostly out of German medical journals ... The old-fashioned cooking and arithmetic combination that had been considered to be dietetics, I would have nothing to do with. In the first place, I wasn’t a very good cook and I wasn’t interested in cooking. I had been brought here to do something practical for the preparation of dietitians, but I wasn’t able to suggest anything practical. What I wanted was to establish a scientific foundation for the various practices that were taught as nutrition at that time" (2). Dr. Morgan was committed to building an extremely rigorous scientific curriculum in home economics and nutrition. She said, "Most home economics departments do not demand very much in the way of scientific basis. We demand general chemistry, organic chemistry, biochemistry, physiology, bacteriology, quantitative analysis, and, of course, statistics. That’s the minimum that’s required of the undergraduate." But, the University of California at Berkeley administration criticized the department for its overly rigorous requirements (2).
Research funds were always limited. Thus, to provide funds for research and hiring new faculty, Dr. Morgan accepted funds to train 920 students in "food conservation" in California’s various colleges and normal schools (2). She gave lectures and courses on emergency food service for nurses, teachers and other volunteers. These activities had a negative impact on the department’s reputation on campus, however; the work was viewed as vocational education focusing on stereotypical female activities, which were below the "Berkeley standards."
Thus, she was criticized for conducting vocational training as well as a rigorous science-based curriculum. She was denied access to university research money and told that she could not accept funds from industry or commodity groups (2). Her research animal facilities were extremely limited—homemade cages from cake pans and bookshelves in a far, dark corner of the Life Sciences Building. And, her repeated requests to establish a graduate program in her Department were denied. Yet, she was not deterred, and she found ways to overcome these obstacles. Experiments done by students in her undergraduate laboratory classes provided preliminary data for her research. She established an Interdepartmental Graduate Group in Nutrition, which still exists today, for offering graduate degrees in nutrition. With her organizational skills and political finesse, she established a prestigious human nutrition program at a highly regarded university that benefited women scientists in human nutrition then and into the future.
Morgan’s research.
Dr. Morgan conducted research on "women’s issues," i.e., human nutrient requirements and foods. Her early work focused on the vitamin content of processed foods (3). She was the first to demonstrate that a commonly used food preservative, sulfur dioxide, had a protective effect on vitamin C and a damaging effect on thiamin. She also studied the vitamin content of many important California-grown foods, i.e., wheat, almonds and walnuts, and the effects of processing on them (4). She was interested in defining the cause of low weight in children, and she showed that small supplementary feedings with fruits, milk and wheat germ improved the growth of school children. Using various animal models, rats, guinea pigs, hamsters and cocker spaniels, she analyzed the relationships between vitamins and hormones. Her studies of dietary calcium, phosphorus, vitamin D and parathyroid hormone demonstrated that an over dosage of vitamin D produced brittle bones and calcification of soft tissues. She also investigated interactions between vitamin A, carotene and thyroid secretion, and between riboflavin, panthothenic acid and adrenal gland secretions.
Her research of pantothenic acid and adrenal gland function brought her the most recognition. In 1940 she showed that pantothenic acid is essential for normal pigmentation of hair and skin (5). A diet deficient in the B vitamins was systematically supplemented with thiamin, chloride, riboflavin, a wheat germ preparation, yeast extracts and adrenal cortex extracts to show that the depigmentation of the hair of the animals was due to adrenal insufficiency caused by a lack of pantothenic acid. The graying pattern of the deficient animals resembled that of fashionable silver fox furs. Morgan persuaded a commercial fox breeder to feed a few of his foxes a pantothenate-low diet. The typical gray hair of those foxes was used to make a fur stole for Dr. Morgan. The stole contained one pelt from control animals, which had a deep lustrous shiny black coat; the pelt from the deficient animals was one-half the size of the other and a dingy gray. She wore this stole when she presented the data from this study at the 1939 annual meeting of the American Society for Experimental Biology and in 1949 when she received the prestigious Garvan Medal of the American Chemical Society for this research.
Towards the end of Dr. Morgan’s career, the Nutrition Department became involved in an Agricultural Experimental Station Regional Project to evaluate the nutritional status of elderly individuals living in San Mateo County (4). The survey included seven day food intake records and a diet history, a complete physical examination with x-rays of the bones and laboratory analyses of blood and urine. The biochemical findings were published in The Journal of Nutrition in 1955 (6). The results of this survey showed for the first time that the bone density of women decreased between 50 and 65 years of age. They also demonstrated for the first time that serum cholesterol was related to dietary fat intakes.
Before her retirement, Dr. Morgan published about 200 papers, a textbook (Experimental Food Study), and 77 review articles (2). After her retirement she published about 40 more papers. Her vast accomplishments were recognized at a symposium held in her honor in May 1965, commemorating her 50 years of nutrition research at the University of California at Berkeley (Fig. 1). In her closing remarks at that symposium, Dr. Morgan commented, "I am more interested in the future of nutrition than in its past. If we could find some way of adding the word ‘molecular’ to our department name we might be able to command more prestige, funds, and followers." These words reflected her capacity to precisely describe the struggles for establishing nutrition as a field of research on the Berkeley campus then as well as now.
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Doris Howes Calloway (1923–2001) |
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TOPAgnes Fay Morgan (1884-1968)Doris Howes Calloway (1923-2001)CONCLUSIONLITERATURE CITED |
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She attended Ohio State University on a scholarship and received a BS degree in dietetics in 1943 (7). Her mother’s death in her senior year of college along with World War II influenced Doris to continue her work in dietetics rather than studying for a PhD at Ohio State. She completed her dietetic internship at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Thereafter, she took a position as a research dietitian with a Department of the Army research project at the University of Illinois Medical School in Chicago. The project evaluated the impact of dietary protein and physical activity on surgical convalescence. This project marked the beginning of Doris’ human metabolic studies. The research team included Professor H. H. Mitchell, a well-known nutritional scientist who taught Doris the importance of rigor of design and conduct in metabolic studies.
While working with the Army, Doris entered the PhD program at the University of Chicago. During her studies, she met Nathaniel Ogelsby Calloway, a medical intern, and they married on her birthday in 1946. They had two children, David and Candice. Doris completed her PhD in Nutrition in 1947. After WWII, Doris’ husband became very involved in Chicago politics. Those activities overwhelmed them and they were divorced in 1956. On July 4, 1981, she married Robert Nesheim, a well-known nutritionist/food scientist who was Vice-President of Science and Technology for Quaker Oats in Chicago. Doris, being an independent woman, symbolically chose this day for her wedding to indicate that she was not surrendering her independence. After Bob retired from Quaker Oats, they purchased a "farm" in Salinas, California.
Calloway’s professional career.
Dr. Calloway continued to work with the Army after completing her doctoral degree. In 1951 she was made Chief of the Nutrition Branch of the Armed Forces Food and Container Institute in Chicago. Her work focused on properties of food that protect from radiation and found that broccoli reduced the carcinogenic effects of radiation in hamsters. During a major snowstorm in January 1961, administrators at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, California, convinced Dr. Calloway to leave Chicago and to become Chair of the Department of Food Science and Nutrition. While at SRI, she developed food-packaging systems that are still in use today. All of those plastic or foil bags for chips and nuts or the special foil containers used for food in space stem from her work.
Professor George Briggs, Chair of the Department of Nutritional Sciences at UC Berkeley, needed someone to teach diet therapy in 1962. He persuaded Dr. Calloway to commute 50 miles each way to Berkeley twice a week to teach that course. In 1963 she was offered a faculty position at Berkeley, which she accepted. Drs. Calloway and Briggs coauthored a popular nutrition textbook, Nutrition and Physical Fitness, which went through 11 editions.
Immediately upon joining the faculty at the Unversity of California at Berkeley, Dr. Calloway established the "Penthouse" for conducting human metabolic studies in collaboration with her colleague, Dr. Sheldon Margen, a physician. This facility was located in a three-bedroom apartment on the top floor of Morgan Hall that had been used previously to train students in household management. Nearly 75 human metabolic studies on protein, energy, vitamin and mineral metabolism, which served as the basis for many student dissertations, were conducted in the Penthouse before it was closed in 1977.
Although Dr. Calloway did not like administration, she was an excellent leader and served in many administrative capacities during her career. On the Berkeley campus, she chaired the Graduate Group in Nutrition and served as chair of the Department of Nutritional Sciences. She also was appointed Provost of the Professional Schools and Colleges at Berkeley from 1981 to 1987 where she worked diligently to provide equal opportunities for women and minorities. She was the first woman to be appointed to such a high level of administration of the Berkeley campus. Her accomplishments include hiring the first woman Dean of the School of Public Health and the first African-American as Dean of the School of Education. She also held numerous leadership positions within professional societies. She was President and Secretary of the American Society for Nutritional Sciences, a member of the Executive Committee for FASEB and for the Food and Nutrition Board, and on advisory councils for the National Institute of Arthritis, Metabolism, and Digestive Diseases, the National Institute of Aging, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Pew National Nutrition Program and the Consultative Group in International Agricultural Research.
Calloway’s Research.
Dr. Calloway conducted research on a broad spectrum of human nutrition and food science (7), most of which was completed using the metabolic facilities in the "Penthouse" at Berkeley. Her work focused on gut microflora and intestinal gas, metabolism of nitrogen and amino acids in humans, human energy requirements and the functional consequences of marginal nutrition. Like other women nutrition scientists, much of her research focused on issues about women, i.e., the menstrual cycle, pregnancy and lactation, and energy needs for women’s work.
I had the privilege of studying the nitrogen requirements of pregnant women with Dr. Calloway for my doctoral dissertation (8). Earlier investigators of nutrition and reproduction, Icie Macy Hoobler, Helen Hunscher, Bertha Burke, Helen Oldham and Agnes Higgins, all emphasized that women’s needs are only met if they suffer no visible harm from repeated pregnancies, if they produce enough nourishing milk for their babies, and if their babies are healthy. Dr. Calloway supported that premise, i.e., requirements should not be placed on lower limits, but rather on the best outcomes for mothers and babies (1), and our studies of nitrogen retention in pregnant adolescents showed that they retained more nitrogen with higher protein intakes (8). This information influenced her contributions to the 1974 Recommended Dietary Allowances (9). An additional 30 g of protein was recommended for pregnant women in that edition; previously an addition of only 10 g was recommended. This recommendation led to much debate about the efficiency of protein utilization by pregnant women. But, Dr. Calloway argued that the potential risk to the mother and infant from inadequate intakes of protein justified the higher recommendation.
Dr. Calloway was concerned about the lack of information regarding nutritional allowances for women. Thus, she studied menstruation and the protein and energy requirements of women. Her studies of the hormonal changes during the menstrual cycle showed that nitrogen retention tended to increase at the time of ovulation and just before or at the onset of menstruation (10). She also observed an energy cycle in menstruating women with the lowest basal metabolic rate occurring about one week before menstruation (11,12). Based on these cyclic variations and other information, Dr. Calloway estimated that the energy and protein allowances for men and women should be similar, unless the women are pregnant, in which case they should receive more (1).
Dr. Calloway’s concern about the nutriture of disadvantaged groups was a theme throughout her research career. She was especially interested in the consequences of insufficient food among the economically disadvantaged. She studied the food habits of Native Americans on reservations in Arizona (13), the children of welfare recipients in Marin County, California (14) and toddlers of migrant farm workers (15). Dr. Calloway referred to this work as a "foray into the real-world nutrition problems" (1). She clearly believed that she had an obligation to translate her research findings and scientific knowledge into policies and programs that would benefit disadvantaged individuals. During the latter part of her research career, Dr. Calloway investigated the functional consequences of malnutrition among families living in three developing countries–Mexico, Egypt and Kenya. Although most anticipated that protein-energy malnutrition would be the underlying nutritional problem, some essential micronutrients supplied by animal foods, (i.e., iron, zinc, vitamin B-12 and B-6) were associated with functional consequences of malnutrition. This study led to a more comprehensive view of dietary interventions—that diet quality is just as important as diet quantity.
Dr. Calloway’s contributions to nutritional science were published in over 125 research papers and numerous technical reports. The work was done largely with her 33 graduate students, many of whom went on to faculty positions around the world. Her results formed the basis for protein and energy recommendations established by the Institute of Medicine’s Food and Nutrition Board and by the Food and Agricultural Organization/World Health Organization Expert Committees. Her work was also acknowledged with awards from the American Institute of Nutrition and the American Dietetic Association. She was elected into the NAS Institute of Medicine and a recipient of the Bristol-Myers Squibb/Mead Johnson Award for distinguished achievement in nutrition. In 1992, two years after her retirement, she was selected to give the University of California at Berkeley Faculty Research Lecture. She entitled her talk, "Maintaining a Balance," a title that reflected her commitment to balancing her scientific and administrative work with her personal values of rigor, honesty, objectivity, integrity and human equality (7).
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CONCLUSION |
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TOPAgnes Fay Morgan (1884-1968)Doris Howes Calloway (1923-2001)CONCLUSIONLITERATURE CITED |
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FOOTNOTES |
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LITERATURE CITED |
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TOPAgnes Fay Morgan (1884-1968)Doris Howes Calloway (1923-2001)CONCLUSIONLITERATURE CITED |
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1. Calloway, D. H. (1984) 21st Lenna Frances Cooper Memorial Lecture: Nutrition research by and about women. J. Am. Diet. Assoc. 84:642-648.[Medline]
2. Nerad, M. (1999) The Academic Kitchen 1999 State University of New York Press Albany, New York, NY .
3. Committee on Faculty Research Lecture (1950) The Faculty Bulletin 1950 University of California Berkeley .
4. Okey, R. (1992) Agnes Fay Morgan (1884–1968): A Biographical Sketch. Darby, W. J. Jukes, T. H. eds. Founders of Nutrition Science 1992:772-777 American Institute of Nutrition Bethesda, MD. .
5. Morgan, A. F. & Simms, H. D. (1940) Greying of fur and other disturbances in several species due to a vitamin deficiency. J. Nutr. 18:233-250.
6. Gillum, H. L., Morgan, A. F., Williams, R. I., Jerome, D. W., Murai, M. & Sailen, F. (1955) The nutritional status of the aging. A summary of the biochemical findings in a study of 577 supposedly healthy men and women over 50 years of age. J. Nutr. 55(2–4):1-685.
7. King, J. C. (2003) Doris Howes Calloway (1923–2001). J. Nutr. 133:2113-2116.
8. King, J. C., Calloway, D. H. & Margen, S. (1973) Nitrogen retention, total body 40K and weight gain in teenage pregnant girls. J. Nutr. 103:772-785.
9. Committee on Dietary Allowances (1974) Recommended Dietary Allowances 8th ed. 1974 National Academy of Sciences Washington, D.C.
10. Calloway, D. H. & Kurzer, M. S. (1982) Menstrual cycle and protein requirements of women. J. Nutr. 112:356-366.
11. Solomon, S. J., Kurzer, M. S. & Calloway, D. H. (1983) Menstrual cycle and basal metabolic rate in women. Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 36:611-616.
12. Kurzer, M. S. & Calloway, D. H. (1986) Effects of energy deprivation on sex hormone patterns in healthy menstruating women. Am. J. Physiol. 251:E483-E488.[Medline]
13. Butte, N. F., Calloway, D. H. & Van Duzen, J. L. (1981) Nutritional assessment of pregnant and lactating Navajo women. Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 34:2216-2228.
14. Ruffin, M., Calloway, D. H. & Margen, S. (1972) Nutritional status of preschool children of Marin County welfare recipients. Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 25:74-84.[Abstract]
15. Receveur, O., Ritchie, L., Calloway, D. H. & Murphy, S. (1992) Growth of children and socioeconomic status of Mexican-American farmworker families in Tulare County, California: 1969 vs 1989. Ecol. Food. Nutr. 28:65-74.
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