Strategies of International Community-Building in Early Twentieth-Century Metabolism Research: The Foreign Laboratory Visits of Francis Gano Benedict

Abstract

In the early twentieth century, nutrition was a developing science, emerging at the intersection of physiological questions and the public health concerns and approaches embodied by the field of hygiene. Its rising status as an independent research field converged with the growing self-confidence of American physiology and with the expansion of international scientific communities. In these crucial decades for American physiology, Francis Gano Benedict, director of the Carnegie Nutrition Laboratory, made seven extended tours of European laboratories that specialized in the study of nutrition, biocalorimetry, metabolism, and respiration gas analysis. The reports of his tours show the strategies and challenges of establishing a new laboratory with leadership intentions in the international arena and of creating and coordinating a community of researchers across the boundaries of language, politics, laboratories, and methods.