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For the Children. The tragedy of the Donner Party, say Dr. Keys and fellow authors, "is notable for the extent of recourse to cannibalism." They offer these tentative explanations: "Group discipline was practically nonexistent, the bodies of the dead were preserved at hand by the cold, and compunctions are easily overcome in the face of the needs of one's children."
Geography is no bar to cannibalism, but racial habits seem to be. "Among Orientals," say the authors, "where vast numbers are so often reduced to the extremity of want . . . cases of cannibalism are so few as to excite wonder." The explanation, they think, may lie in the power of religion. "In the Orient, the concept of the complete dissociation of body and soul is less fixed than in the Western world."
Much of the clinical material in The Biology of Human Starvation was gathered in the famous wartime Minnesota Experiment on semi-starvation, for which 36 conscientious objectors served as guinea pigs (TIME, March 29, 1948). Last week, 10 of the conscientious guinea pigs, recovered from their voluntary hardships, sat down to a formal dinner in Minneapolis with Dr. Keys and the other experimenters to celebrate the book's completion. They ate steak and potatoes.
* Drs. Josef Brozek, Austin Henschel, Olaf Mickelsen and Henry Longstreet Taylor, assisted by Dr. Ernst Simonson, Mrs. Angie Sturgeon Skinner and Dr. Samuel M. Wells.