Eskimos and the 1979 Eskimo experiment

D HS 4/1

1944-92

Hugh Macdonald Sinclair was born in 1910 and came from a well connected family. He was educated at Winchester and Oriel College. He continued his studies at University College Hospital and obtained his Oxford DM in 1939. Sinclair was elected as university demonstrator and lecturer in biochemistry at Oxford, and a fellow of Magdalen College, in 1937. Sinclair was the Director of the Oxford Nutrition Survey (ONS) from 1942-7. The ONS carried out surveys for the Government on a wide range of groups in the UK, such as pregnant women, students and manual workers. The surveys were used to help ensure that ration levels were sufficient for maintaining a healthy population. The ONS also carried out survey work in the British occupied areas of Germany and the Netherlands after the war where the people were suffering from malnutrition. The ONS became the Laboratory of Human Nutrition (LHN) in 1946. Sinclair was appointed Reader in Human Nutrition at Oxford in 1951. However, by this time the study of nutrition as a separate subject was not viewed by many in the medical profession or academia to be necessary; it was felt all significant research on the subject had already been done. Sinclair lost his position at Oxford in 1958. The loss of Sinclair’s post was also contributed by other factors. One was his interest in the relative deficiency of essential polyunsaturated fatty acids (EFAs) which he felt was the main cause of various ‘diseases of civilization’ such as heart disease. In 1956 he wrote a long and controversial letter outlining his views to The Lancet (6 April 1956, 381). He was widely disagreed with. We now know that Sinclair was ahead of the times and take for granted that EFAs play an important role in human nutrition. Another factor was Sinclair’s unfortunate manner of dealing with authority, something that many remember him for. Although he lost his readership he remained a fellow at Magdalen. Sinclair spent the next few years teaching abroad and raising money to set up an independent nutrition institute. Largely with independent means, he set up the International Institute of Human Nutrition (IIHN) in 1972 and spent the rest of his life trying to raise funds for what he saw as a key research institute for the study of nutrition. Sinclair continued to research the role of EFAs and particularly studied population groups such as Eskimos who had little instances of heart disease but had a diet high in fat. His interest in this area had first occurred during the War when he visited Canada to assist the Air Force in investigating snow-blindness. He made his initial observations about the Eskimo population and their diet during his time in Canada and in 1976 when he gained funding to study Eskimos in Greenland. In 1979 Sinclair set out to prove the importance of EFAs by living off of an Eskimo diet for 100 days. He ate only seal and fish and tested his blood clotting times. This self-experiment was controversial and he did not receive any external funding as no ethics committee would approve the diet. Sinclair believed that self-experimentation was key and that testing animals alone was not enough to further research on human nutrition. His results were never properly written up but he did find that his clotting time extended greatly. No other major research was undertaken by Sinclair although much work was carried out at the IIHN. He sat on many committees, attended a great number of conferences and advised on areas such as fluoridation of water and EFAs. He was a visiting lecturer at the University of Reading (1970-80) and oversaw many students at Magdalen. By the 1970s his ideas on EFAs had become much more widely accepted and the importance of his contribution acknowledged which he greatly enjoyed. He died in 22 June 1990.

The bulk of the collection consists of articles, extracts, guidebooks, letters and posters relating either to studies of Eskimos or to Sinclair’s experimental Eskimo diet. Included documents date between 1944 and 1992, with much material dating either to the period of the actual experiment in 1979-1980, or to its aftermath in the mid-1980s. Some documents relating to the period immediately after Sinclair’s death, in 1990, comprise correspondence between Sinclair’s assistant Mary Gale and various scientists with whom Sinclair worked during the Eskimo Diet Experiment. Overall, a full perspective of the experiment can be obtained from the collection, including Sinclair’s preparation for the experiment and his applications for funding, details of the experiment itself and tables of the results which he obtained, and the aftermath of the experiment and the conclusions which he began to draw based on his findings. The folders in the collection mostly contain photocopied articles or book extracts. Most focus on lipids, often examining the nature either of Eskimo lipids or of lipids obtained from their diet. The link between lipids and certain diseases is also a common theme in the articles. A number of folders listed under headings such as “Lipoproteins” or “Blood” contain correspondence between Sinclair and the medical institutions who had agreed to carry out tests upon him during his Eskimo diet. Often tables or graphs of results are attached to these letters. Letters of a more social nature, usually organising visits or dinners, are also present in the collection. The included notebooks contain mostly tables or graphs of results from certain tests, as well as bibliographies of the studies Sinclair used in his research. Hand-drawn graphs, tables of results, and posters advertising the experiment are present in one of the boxes in the collection.

74 files

series

D HS 1/6/2