Dear Sam, Sorry to hear you died in 1956. The crassness of modern ‘tech’

The crassness of modern life is sometimes exemplified by the ‘tech’ companies that make their business the distribution of scientific papers from the past and present and an attempt to be the site of discussion between scientists.

I was sent a link by one of their regular and too frequent emails drawing my attention to a paper by Samuel Brody (with Arthur Chester Ragsdale, 1890-1969, and Charles Wesley Turner, 1897-1975). The last time I actually read that paper was as an old-fashioned pre-Xerox photocopy made in the 1950s in the collection of a late colleague. How nice to read it again and within milliseconds it was downloaded. But then came a the follow-up seconds later inviting me to thank the author and to tell him what had sparked my interest in the paper. There was though a problem. The author had died in 1956 so where was the message to be sent? The same place as emails to Santa Claus?

It is difficult to appreciate the mindset of those who think the science they are interested in began within the last ten years. Especially that is when they are encouraged to think so by PhD supervisors, as, regrettably, is the case even in UK here we once had a more rigorous respect for knowing the literature.

So I shall not be writing to thank Sam Brody but it is worth pointing out who he was and why the research he did is still important.

Sam Brody ca 1930 when he was a
Guggenheim Fellow in 1929 and 1931
From here

Sam Brody produced the famous mouse-to-elephant curve which shows how metabolic rate varies with body weight and which followed up Max Kleiber’s work on a few species which suggested that metabolic rate (effectively oxygen consumption) did not increase linearly with body eight but as around the three-quarter power of body weight. In other words metabolic rate per kilogram is much lower in the elephant than it is in the mouse. The reason for this relation between metabolic rate and body weight is still a very active interest although it does seem that a present more heat has been generated than light has been shed on the problem in recent years.

A second area of research in which Sam Brody is remembered is for his demonstration that the frequency of milking in dairy animals leads to an increase in the rate of milks secretion. The mechanism by which that happens kept me occupied for many years and has particular application in not only dairy animals but also in human lactation where the frequency and completeness of milk removal are key determinants of breastfeeding success.

Samuel Brody was professor of dairy husbandry in the University of Missouri. He was born in Lithuania in 1890. He emigrated to Canada in 1906 where he worked as a machinist, miner, fisherman and door-to-door salesman. He then obtained a place across the border as a student at the National Agricultural School in Pennsylvania. Hearing of great things happening at the University of California at Berkeley he had to teach himself to read and write in English in order to pass the entrance exam and study there. He graduated in 1917 in biochemistry. Following a masters he spent a short time in the US Air Force and worked in the University of California until he appointed to his post in Missouri in 1920. He died in his office in August 1956.

Brody’s work on growth, metabolism, thyroid function and milk production established his international reputation—which leads me on to my second point. It is little recognised that advances in human reproductive physiology in particular and in human health generally have been made under the aegis of funding for agricultural research. With that funding drastically reduced in recent decades, particularly in UK, that generation of new knowledge has ceased—yet another reason for condemning successive governments and devolved administrations for following the mantra of its unimportance with agriculture only being responsible for 2% of GDP but ignoring the rather important matter of national food security and its 100% role in keeping people alive.

Meanwhile the crassness continues. In requesting that I ask co-authors to join, a list is provided of those not belonging. That list includes one who has been dead for 49 years.