Year: 2003
Type: article
Abstract: Out of the Box Man is not a ratWith reference to my last column 1 , John Garrow tells me that 'man is not a rat' is not his aphorism (Garrow J, personal communication).He attended a meeting in Paris in 1973 with the theme 'Energy balance and obesity in man'.The distinguished French chairman was blind, and successive speakers, whose papers concerned energy balance in laboratory rats, overran their scheduled times.Dr Otto Edholm of the MRC unit at Hampstead was on last.When he came to speak, the time for the whole meeting had passed.In John's words: 'Otto had good data on men (mostly military trainees).He noted that it was time for him to end his presentation, said it could be summarised thus: "Man is not a rat", and with these words stepped down from the stage to applause from me, and bewildered silence from the other members of the audience, who were mostly "pure" scientists'. Lighting a candleTwo qualities in common between John Garrow and David Horrobin are a sense of style and giving due credit.In 1990, the McCarrison Society published a tribute to the life's work of Hugh Sinclair, which I edited 2 .Davidthen at a height of his success with the products of evening primrose oil branded as Efamol -put up the money and told of how, when he was postgraduate at Magdalen College, Oxford, Hugh inspired him to move to nutritional medicine, and to essential fatty acids and the health of the nervous and other systems.David reminded me that he and I both featured in a Balliol freshmen's photograph taken many years before.My rooms then overlooked the Martyrs' Memorial, where Hugh Latimer, a churchman who opposed the enclosure of peasant land, was burned for his sedition, or what might now be called food terrorism, declaring on the stake that 'we shall this day light such a candle by God's grace. . .as I trust will never be put out'.Hugh was moved when I gave him a copy of our festschrift, two weeks before he died.For the World Cancer Research Fund in the 1990s, David reviewed applications for research grants promptly, incisively and generously.Typically of him, he attacked the peer review system 3 , yet helped those who work within current paradigms.David created space for the expression of ideas in Medical Hypotheses, a journal he founded, and encouraged mainstream editors to publish original thinking.Another testament to David is his last Lancet article, written when he knew he was dying (Kelliher A, personal communication), about ethical problems of long-term trials of treatments for diseases likely to kill quickly 4 .
Source: Public Health Nutrition
DOI: 10.1079/phn2003504
Author: Geoffrey Cannon
Language: English
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4229664117