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Division of Nutritional Sciences, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853 and * Department of Animal Science, University of California, Davis California 95616
1To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: mcn2{at}cornell.edu.
Leo Chandler Norris died on February 3, 1986 in Lawrence, Kansas in his 95th year. He was one of the founders of nutrition programs at Cornell University in the formative years of the development of nutrition as a science. Norris was one of the great teachers and researchers of his era. His career spanned most of the period of discovery of the nutrients required by animals and humans.
Leo Norris was born on March 6, 1891 in Canaseraga, New York, 1 of 4 children of Charles Leslie Norris and Sarah Chandler Norris. He graduated from high school in Hornell, New York in 1909 and spent 1 year at Alfred University. Tragedy struck when his mother died of cancer after that first year of college. Norris took on the responsibility of caring for and overseeing the education of his 2 younger sisters, working as a school custodian for 6 years to support them. He enrolled in Cornell’s College of Agriculture in 1916. He was in the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC), and he enlisted in the army in 1918, where he was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant. He served in the 6th machine gun battalion of the 10th infantry at Camp Custer, Michigan until he was discharged. With the end of WW I, he returned to Cornell and received his B.S. degree in Agriculture in 1920.
In 1915, the Department of Animal Husbandry at Cornell University hired L. A. Maynard, a new Ph.D. graduate in Chemistry from Cornell. Maynard had developed a strong interest in nutrition while he was an undergraduate at Wesleyan College where he was inspired by a course he had taken from W. O. Atwater. The department head, Elmer Savage, was interested in research in the developing field of nutrition and Maynard was hired to form a laboratory and to develop teaching and research in animal nutrition. Over the next 40 years, he became the guiding force behind many developments in nutrition at Cornell, including the founding of a School of Nutrition, development of a Department of Biochemistry, and the establishment of the USDA Plant Soil and Nutrition Laboratory at Ithaca.
Leo Norris, as a mature undergraduate, attracted Maynard’s attention and became Maynard’s first Ph.D. student. Norris’s work with Maynard was directed primarily to the nutrition of dairy calves. His thesis, submitted in February of 1924, was entitled: The Volatile Fatty Acid Production in the Intestinal Tract of Calves Fed Whole Milk or Cereal Gruel. Norris’s graduate program reflected Maynard’s background. Although his major was Animal Nutrition, his minors for the Ph.D. were in organic and physical chemistry. Essentially all of his graduate course work was taken in the Chemistry Department.
In August 1922, the Vice Director of Research in the College of Agriculture, W. H. Chandler, wrote to the Dean of the College of Agriculture, Albert R. Mann, urging him to press the Head of the Poultry Husbandry Department, James E. Rice, to hire a man with a doctoral degree in biological chemistry. Chandler emphasized that this person should carry out his own program of research and should not be an analyst for others in the department. He went on to recommend that this person should have training similar to that of Maynard. Dean Mann quickly made that recommendation to Rice. On June 6, 1923, Rice recommended the appointment of Leo Norris to the Dean. Because Norris had not yet completed his Ph.D. degree, he was hired as an Instructor by the Poultry Husbandry Department and was made an assistant professor in 1926 when his degree was completed. He was named Professor of Poultry Husbandry in 1936. Although he was appointed to join the nutrition division of the department, headed by G. F. Heuser, Norris was to develop his own program of research. His appointment had no expectation of undergraduate teaching.
The appointment began a career of 36 years at Cornell in the Poultry Science Department. Norris’s first research paper, published from his work with G. F. Heuser, was on rickets in chicks and he continued to publish on this topic for several years. The rapid growth of newly hatched chicks made them sensitive to the lack of nutrients in the simplified diets that Norris devised. The search for "unidentified growth factors" characterized much of the future research from Norris’s laboratory. In 1930, he described a specific type of leg weakness or paralysis in growing chickens that could be prevented with a milk concentrate (1). This was the first description of the classic deficiency disease termed "curled toe paralysis" that later became known as a principal sign of riboflavin deficiency in growing chicks. This condition was often observed in commercial poultry raising and limited the success of efforts to intensify poultry production. In the early 1930s, the deficiency was considered to be the result of a lack of vitamin G, a designation that eventually was sorted out as involving both riboflavin and pantothenic acid. In 1931 Norris and his colleagues described a pellagra-like syndrome, which later proved to be the result of a pantothenic acid deficiency (2). Vitamin G deficiency and requirements were described in detail in a series of papers published during the 1930s. Using a bioassay based on growth of young chicks, Norris and his students determined the vitamin G potency of many feedstuffs (3). When pure riboflavin became available, the validity of the vitamin G research was confirmed, and the careful quantitative studies were readily translated to amounts of pure riboflavin.
The discovery that milk contained vitamin G led to a new use for dried whey as a feed ingredient. Whey, a by-product of cheese making, had been largely thrown away until its value as a riboflavin source became apparent through Norris’s work. He developed a close relationship with David Peebles who had developed a drying technique for milk products that he used to convert whey into a feed ingredient. Peebles was a founder of the Western Condensing Company in Appleton, Wisconsin. The company produced large amounts of dried whey, which was important in the early growth of a broiler industry in the United States. Norris and Peebles became close friends, and Peebles provided considerable support for Norris’s work over many years,
In 1936, in a letter to Science, with his graduate student, Herbert Wilgus, Jr., and colleague Gustav Heuser, Norris showed that another problem of leg weakness in growing chickens termed "perosis" was due to manganese deficiency (4). The elucidation of the need of growing chickens for sufficient manganese to prevent leg weakness led to the large-scale intensification of broiler production in the United States. For a few cents per ton of feed, it was possible to add enough manganese sulfate to prevent the poor growth and reproduction, and the crippling leg weakness in commercial poultry flocks.
In the 1930s and 40s, Norris’s laboratory was involved in the study of most of the newly discovered growth factors of that era. Along with his student Milton Scott, he worked on folic acid and vitamin B-12. Scott, working with Norris at the time, said that they had concentrated the animal protein factor in a "pink solution" about the time vitamin B-12 was isolated by Karl Folkers and colleagues at Merck and by Smith and co-workers at Glaxo laboratories in the United Kingdom. His laboratory spent considerable effort attempting to identify an "unidentified mineral" in the 1950s, which later turned out to be zinc.
With L. A. Maynard, Norris was one of the founders of the School of Nutrition at Cornell. This School was established in 1941 to bring together faculty from throughout the University to participate in teaching and research in nutrition. Norris was named Professor of Nutrition in 1943, and he served as the Secretary of the School of Nutrition from 1941 to 1948. He continued to be a member of the School of Nutrition faculty until his retirement in 1959.
The association of Norris with the training of graduate students is probably his most significant legacy. During his tenure at Cornell, 35 students received the Ph.D. degree under his direction. Norris was not married, and his graduate students became his extended family. He worked closely with them, insisted they have strong training in the basic sciences, and was demanding in his expectations for accuracy, honesty, hard work, and attention to detail. He wanted them to attend scientific meetings, and through seminars, he insisted that they learn to present their work well. Although he was a stern taskmaster, "Doc" was held in great affection by his students. He told his students that to succeed in the world they should learn to play bridge and golf. Although Norris seldom taught in a formal classroom setting, he was given the Teaching Award of the Poultry Science Association in 1957, in recognition of his influence on the field through the training of graduate students. His students were widely distributed in important positions in universities and industry throughout the United States and abroad.
Leo Norris served the nutrition community at large by his work on many boards and national committees. He was a member of the Board on Agriculture of the National Research Council from 1949 to 1961, and a member of the Committee on Animal Nutrition from 1943 to 1963. He served as Chairman of the Committee from 1945 to 1962. This Committee directed the preparation of nutrition standards for most of the domestic animals important in food production. He helped to establish the Cornell Nutrition Conference for Feed Manufacturers in 1934, a meeting that continues to the present time.
Norris was on the editorial board of the Journal of Nutrition, Poultry Science, The Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine, and the editorial committee of the American Society of Biological Chemists. He became President of the American Institute of Nutrition in 1962–63. He was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Poultry Science Association, and the American Institute of Nutrition. In addition to the teaching award, he received the first Borden award for Nutrition Research from the Poultry Science Association in 1938. He was a Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Sydney in 1964 and, in that year, he was also elected an honorary member of the Japanese Society of Zootechnical Sciences.
When Norris reached the mandatory retirement age of 65 in 1959, he became an Emeritus Professor at Cornell. The University of California at Davis offered him a 1-year appointment, which he accepted in 1960, intending to return to Cornell to continue his work in Ithaca in retirement. The lure of California was too great, however, and he spent his retirement years in Davis, working with colleagues in the Avian Science and Nutrition groups. He developed an active research program at Davis and continued to publish with students and colleagues there for a number of years. He became interested in calcium requirements of male chickens while working on a NASA project. He found that the male fowl had an extremely low requirement for calcium (5). At Davis, he enjoyed attending weekly informal seminars and stimulated others with his historical perspectives and comments. Norris gave several stimulating lectures on the history of nutrition as part of an advanced nutrition course at Davis. He was a member of the Davis community for more than 25 years after he left Cornell. In the course of his work at Cornell and Davis, he published over 250 papers.
The opportunity to enjoy the outdoors for much of the year was one of the attractions of California for Norris. He especially enjoyed hunting and fishing. There was a mounted head of a big horn mountain sheep in his Cornell office, and he also had a moose head mounted as a trophy. The moose head turned out to be too large to hang either in the department or in his home, and its disposition caused some consternation. It eventually ended up decorating a wall of a local Boy Scout Camp near Ithaca. He owned several horses in his lifetime, and riding was a favorite pastime. He also loved to travel, frequently to out of the way places in Canada, the Rockies, and Alaska.
Leo Norris often had students live with him for companionship and to help with the chores of living, particularly in his later years. For about the last 10 years, this student was Christopher Asey, a raptor enthusiast from the Avian Science Department at Davis. He understood Norris very well and was a devoted companion to him. They went on frequent trips, usually to go boating or camping since they both loved the outdoors. When Chris married, his wife Janet joined the household and Leo was treated as one of the family. Janet was accepted for graduate study at the University of Kansas, and they all moved to Lawrence in the summer of 1985. Leo’s health deteriorated after the move, and he died in Lawrence on February 3, 1986. Leo Norris will be remembered as a prolific and productive research scientist and dedicated teacher, whose achievements are an enduring part of the history of nutrition.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS |
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LITERATURE CITED |
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 TOP LITERATURE CITED |
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1. Norris, L. C., Heuser, G. F. & Wilgus, H. S., Jr (1930) Is the chief value of milk for poultry feeding due to the presence of a new vitamin?. Poult. Sci. 9:133-140.
2. Ringrose, A. T., Norris, L. C. & Heuser, G. F. (1931) The occurrence of a pellagra-like syndrome in chicks. Poult. Sci. 10:166-177.
3. Gallup, W. D & Norris, L. C. (1938) The essentialness of manganese in bone development. Science (Washington, DC) 87:18-19.
4. Wilgus, H. S., Jr, Norris, L. C. & Heuser, G. F. (1935) The relative protein efficiency and the relative vitamin G content of common protein supplements used in poultry rations. J. Agric. Res. 51:383-399.
5. Norris, L. C., Kratzer, F. H., Lin, H. J., Hellewell, A. B. & Beljan, J. R. (1972) Effect of quantity of calcium on maintenance of bone integrity in mature white leghorn male chickens. J. Nutr. 102:1085-1091.
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