Revisionist History - The Rise of the Guinea Pigs

Episode Date: September 29, 2022

The Minnesota Starvation Experiment could never be done today. No scientist could get permission to starve 36 healthy people for close to a year. But why? Revisionist History tries to follow the strange logic that governs our thinking about medical experiments.  If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podcasts, be sure to sign up for our email list at Pushkin.fm.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

One of my favorite podcasts is called This Week in Virology. TWIV, as it's known. This Week in Virology, the podcast about viruses, the kind that make you sick. On the show, a prominent virologist named Vincent Racaniello has a weekly chat with colleagues from around the country, updating their listeners on the latest news from around the world about microbes. TWIV is a very big deal. It's the Tonight Show, only for virologists. For my birthday, my friend Charles got me a TWIV t-shirt, which I'm wearing right now. TWIV has taught me more about science than almost anything I can remember. And one of their most memorable episodes

is called, I Love the Smell of Vaccines in the Morning. Many people sent this to us asking our thoughts. And so there you go. We're going to give you our thoughts. I Love the Smell of Vaccines in the Morning came out in the winter of 2022. The Twivers wanted to talk about a study that had just been published entitled Safety, Tolerability, and Viral Kinetics During SARS-CoV-2 Human Challenge. This is a study where you deliberately infect human volunteers under very carefully controlled conditions. They're under hospital care. They're isolated, right?

You've got antivirals and monoclonals at the ready should anything happen. The Human Challenge trial had 36 unvaccinated subjects, all between the ages of 18 and 29. All volunteers who agreed to be infected with COVID in a concentrated dose administered through the nasal cavity. The aim of the study was to figure out a crucial bit of information that was still unknown in the early days of the pandemic. How large a dose of COVID do you have to be exposed to before you get infected? SARS-CoV-2 is not without risk. I mean, it's not Ebola, right? But it's not common cold either. The TWIV crew went on for close to two hours about the study, combed through every detail, went on fascinating digressions, looked for insights and inconsistencies, and all came to the same conclusion.

I would love to have been privy to the discussions that led up to the approval of this to see what they're thinking, right? Yeah. approval of this to see what they're thinking right yeah because i have to say i wouldn't be in favor of this because if one person dies that's the end of it and that person's family is pretty upset pretty upset i would say very upset it's difficult because when you look at the paper and you see the results okay and nobody. Nobody even got really sick. I mean, really sick, okay? When you look at it from that point of view, you go, oh, wow, this is great. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.

This is part two of our examination of the Minnesota starvation experiment. Part one was about what happened when Ancel Keys invited a group of young men to spend a year in a dingy set of rooms under the University of Minnesota football stadium. This episode is about the strange way that so many scientists think about the morality of human experiments. Like, for example, the experiment described in the TWIV episode, I love the smell of vaccines in the morning. When the crew at This Week in Virology start talking about the experiment, they sound reasonable. There was very careful consideration given by the authors and a whole bunch of other people as to whether they turned it ethical.

So no matter what we might think, okay, there are a whole bunch of people who thought that this was just fine. That's Rich Condit of the University of Florida, another of the TWIV mainstays. Medicine is typically in the business of trying to make sick people healthy, but there's no question that you can learn more by making healthy people sick. Making healthy people sick means you can study a disease from the very beginning, as opposed to the point where the patient shows up in your office. It means you can choose exactly the kind of disease you want to study, the precise strain of virus, the exact species of bacteria. You can choose who you want to study, young people, old people, world-class marathoners,

the thin, the overweight. You can compare different treatments easily and cheaply. But when you go from healthy to sick, you have a big ethical problem. The Hippocratic Oath all physicians take says, first do no harm. So how can you justify infecting healthy people with a potentially deadly virus? If I were confronted personally with whether or not to launch or support this study, I'm not sure I would do it. Then Breanne Barker, a virologist at Drew University, chimed in. Yeah, I was trying to imagine if I was in this age group,

would I be interested in being in the study? And my answer was absolutely not. The more they talked about it, the more adamant the TWIV crew became. I would not have approved this. If I were on the committee, I would have voted no. At some point, there's going to be a young person who seems perfectly healthy, who's got something we don't know about

and is going to die here. And that's what I'm concerned about. And I don't know how, I'm sure these people don't know anything we don't know. All right. I don't know how they can sleep at night. Now, why are we spending so much time on the issue that Twivers had with this obscure COVID study? Because the Minnesota starvation experiment was exactly the same kind of human challenge trial. Ancel Keys took 36 perfectly healthy young men

and made them sick by starving them for months. A study like that should raise a million red flags. Right? The Minnesota Starvation Experiment ran during the final year of the Second World War, and the subjects were all drawn from the pool of men who had refused military service, conscientious objectors. There were about 72,000 registered conscientious objectors in the United States during the Second World War.

Some served in the military in non-combat roles. Others chose alternative service and were put to work fighting forest fires or staffing hospitals. They did social work in the Deep South. They worked as orderlies in state mental health facilities. Many of them were digging ditches and grading roads and doing things that simply couldn't be defined as work of national importance. That's the historian Sarah Tracy, who's been researching the Minnesota starvation experiment. Conscientious objectors had been used as medical guinea pigs. And the US civilian public service and selective service learn about this. And so there is this program that about 700 of the 12,000 conscientious objectors who were doing work of national importance, so-called work of national importance,

about 700 of them enroll in medical experiments all around the country. Among the researchers who used human guinea pigs was Ansel Keys. He's testing the effects of thiamine deficiency and needs willing test subjects for a long-term study in his lab. Why not these religious pacifists? He writes away and he gets several, about 11, to do vitamin experiments. And that goes very well. He's impressed by these conscientious objectors. They're dedicated, they're committed, they're excellent research subjects. It's from this pool of volunteers that Keyes draws the first of the subjects for his starvation experiment. Now, if you want to make healthy people sick,

you have to be completely sure that your subjects are acting autonomously, to use the word favored by ethicists. Meaning, did the subjects make their decision to join the experiment freely, without pressure or constraint? Were they informed of all the consequences? Did they fully understand what they were getting into? The NYU bioethicist Art Kaplan says it's hard for scientists now to find an easy answer to those questions when it comes to the starvation experiment. Bioethicists like me have tended not to comment much on this study. It's interesting. This is such a difficult case that I think people may have steered away from it a little bit. What makes the case so difficult is that Keyes' study was conducted in the middle of a world war.

His subjects were all men who would refuse to fight Nazis in Europe. And because of that, they were subject to intense social pressure. People called them cowards, shirkers, morally bankrupt. Doors were slammed in their faces. And so along comes Ancel Keys, charismatic Ancel Keys. Ancel Keys with a 200-point IQ score. And he says, would you like to be part of a medical experiment that makes a difference, that erases the sin of your absence from the war? Well, of course they're going to say yes. So is that an autonomous decision, or is that a coerced decision?

In the previous episode, we heard how one of the volunteers, Sam Legg, chopped off some of his fingers with an axe in the delirium of his starvation. And then, as he lay in his hospital bed, Legg begged Ansel Keys to let him stay and study. Remember what he told Keys? Doctor, for the rest of my life, people are going to ask me what I did during the war. This experiment is my chance to give an honorable answer to that question. That does not sound like a rational, autonomous decision. That sounds like someone who's terrified to go back to his hometown and tell everyone,

I'm sorry, I've now failed my country twice. As for the second test of autonomy, did the subjects know what they were getting into? Did they fully understand the consequences of their participation? Of course not. That's the whole lesson of the testimony from the 18 volunteers in the Library of Congress. They thought they would be hungry. They didn't understand that starvation could cause them to start losing their moral bearings. Sam Legg remembered one day when he was out walking and saw a boy whiz by on his bicycle. For a very brief, I hope it was brief, moment,

I suddenly hated that boy. And that, I hate at this point to tell you this, because it doesn't speak very well for me. Legg was a committed pacifist, a deeply spiritual man. Did he consent to that feeling when he signed up? He's still ashamed of it half a century later. Frankly, I was amazed or shocked by the study. That's Zohar Lederman, a bioethicist who teaches at the Rambam Medical Campus in Israel and is one of the few people in his field to have written about the Minnesota starvation experiment.

Letterman's big problem is with the notion that the subjects, quote-unquote, volunteered. We serve, Israelis serve in the army as well, and we have a joke about volunteering for something. You don't volunteer in the army. You get volunteered, right? And we even have a special word for it in Hebrew. Only in Israel is there a special word to describe the condition of volunteering without

actually volunteering. Being volunteered. So I suspect that in that environment, and again, I'm not, you know, I'm not a historian. I don't know what it was like during that time in the early 40s in the U.S., but I think we need to be wary of any assumption of voluntariness in that context. Letterman's point is, if an experiment isn't truly voluntary, how do we justify making the subject suffer? If it's minimal harm, you give them diarrhea, I mean, you could say, okay, that's

fine, that's nothing. But if that means that they start chewing gums, chewing a bubble gum all day long, or cutting off their fingers, or developing neurosis, or developing kidney failure, or two people developed kidney failure because of the study, I think at that point you should say, no, that's enough. Regardless of the potential benefits, there are some things we cannot do. There are some things we cannot do. This is exactly where the Twivers ended up as well, in their discussion of the COVID infection study. Remember what Vincent Racanello said? I'm sure these people don't know anything we don't know, all right? I don't know how they can sleep at night.

Now, am I happy that scientists care deeply about the ethical implications of their field? Of course. But there's something I don't quite understand about the arguments used by those who worry about human challenge trials. Listen to this exchange, for example. The TWIV crew are digging deeper and deeper into the details of the COVID infection experiment. And Rich Condit starts reading through the fine print on the study's design. I thought it was interesting that they apparently started out by soliciting volunteers with an online application and got 27,000 responses.

Wait, the people who ran that study didn't have to trick people to get them to sign up or go to some out-of-the-way prison and use inmates as guinea pigs. No, 27,000 people looked around them at the millions of people dying from COVID and said, I'm willing to take that risk to make that sacrifice for society. There was a line out the door, down the block, and clear across town. They were coming to us saying, we're in the middle of a pandemic. I called up Andrew Catchpole, the British virologist who led the COVID infection study. They came to us with phrases like they just wanted to do their bit for the pandemic. They felt that this was something that they could do to help. So it's really heartwarming actually to see that. Now you would think that if you were a virologist on the biggest virology podcast in the world

trying to figure out the ethics of a particular study, then this kind of information would matter. But if you're worrying about consent, then that kind of overwhelming enthusiasm should maybe make you a little less worried. So, like any loyal TWIV listener, I waited for the rest of the crew to start talking about the implications of the 27,000 volunteers. I waited and waited for the TWIVers to make sense of this and… crickets. The conversation just moved on.

All right, so after the screening, they're admitted to individual negative pressure rooms in a quarantine unit, 24-hour monitoring. They're screened for other respiratory infections using what's called a bio... Vincent Racanello might as well have made a big W with his fingers. Whatever. The fact that 27,000 people signed up to get infected with COVID has apparently made no impression at all on these virologists. Human challenge trials are a problem to scientists. Let me read to you from a paper that appeared early in the pandemic in PNAS, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which is about as prestigious as scientific journals get. The

paper was written by a group of America's leading medical ethicists. They're talking about the same general question that was discussed on the TWIV episode. Should people be allowed to volunteer to be deliberately infected with COVID? In this case, they're talking about deliberate infection for testing potential COVID vaccines. They give you the experimental vaccine, then they expose you to COVID to see if it works. And the risk, of course, is that if it doesn't work, you'll get sick. Now, if you volunteer to be a COVID guinea pig in an experiment like that, I'm assuming you understand what you're getting into. But the famous ethicists, in their paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, beg to differ. Here's what they wrote.

Despite acknowledgement in consent forms that participants may not experience direct benefits from the experimental intervention, it is entirely possible that volunteers may labor under a, quote, preventive misconception that they will receive some protection from infection by their participation. That's a lot of gobbledygook, so let me translate for you. You can tell the guinea pig that this vaccine is experimental, that it hasn't been tested, that we don't know yet whether it works, but there is at least a theoretical possibility that one of those guinea pigs are going to misunderstand what's going on,

and the possibility of that misapprehension means that you should never, ever try an experiment like that. I'll be honest, when I read that paper, I got a little puzzled. I mean, what would it take to make these bioethicists happy? What if we screened and vetted and sifted and sorted through every one of the people who volunteered, picking out only the select few who we thought really and truly understood what was going on. Would that make them happy? What if we only pick people with graduate degrees, or ones with IQs over 150, or ones willing to write a 10,000-word essay describing exactly what they think they're getting into? Would that make them happy? Or would they

still be like, I don't know, I think it's entirely possible that volunteers may labor under a preventative misconception. So even as this pandemic rages all around us, let's not do anything at all. Now, how are they so sure of this? Did they debrief anyone who'd been part of a vaccine challenge trial? No, they didn't. I want to talk a little bit more about the men who volunteer and their motivations and how we judge them in retrospect. I brought this issue up with the bioethicist Zohar Lederman

when we were discussing the Minnesota starvation experiment. And I'm wondering, when it comes to assessing the risks and benefits of a study like this, shouldn't what the subjects think matter? You're not interested in what the subjects think. I think in research ethics, as bioethicists, as policymakers, we can only listen to what people want up to a certain point. when it comes to unnecessary harms, when it comes to the ethics per se of a certain policy or certain study, there comes a point when you no longer need to listen to their voices,

but you just have to go on the ethics of it. Actually, no. I think we should listen to the voices. 18 of the surviving members of the starvation experiment left oral histories behind about their experience. On first listen, what's striking about them is what the men went through, their pain. But if you listen more closely, you hear something else. Why were you a conscientious objector?

Well, because when I was in high school, I became acquainted with a fellow by the name of Jesus of Nazareth, and I thought he was a pretty good guy. And I liked what he said, and I liked the way he lived and the way he handled situations with other human beings. I couldn't imagine Jesus. I couldn't visualize him in the uniform of a U.S. Army or any kind of an army. It just didn't fit. And so I basically said, well, if he couldn't do it, I can't do it.

The interviewer asked everyone the same question. Why wouldn't you fight? And each man gives a version of the same answer. Why were you a conscientious objector? I'm not going to kill anybody and I don't want anyone to kill me. God put us on this earth and is the only one that has the right to take us away. These were not people who dodged the draft out of cowardice or indifference. These were deeply moral people from religious traditions like the Quakers or the

Mennonites or the Brethren, that had principled theological objections to war that go back hundreds of years. So, you know, on the most basic level, why were you a conscientious objector? Well, I don't believe in killing people under any circumstances. Conscientious objectors had many ways to serve during the war, but it becomes clear, listening to their accounts, that the issue for them was not what is the easiest or most convenient way to fulfill my wartime obligation.

It was what is the most useful way for me to help alleviate human suffering. That's why some of them volunteer to work as research subjects in Ansel Keys' lab. They want to do more than dig ditches or work as hospital orderlies. So did they suffer during the starvation experiment? Of course they did. But that doesn't make the experiment immoral.

Listen to Sam Legge again, the man who chopped off his own fingers in the delirium of malnourishment. Many decades later, this is what he has to say. Everybody else around us is pulling down the world. We want to build it up. We want to be of service. Here was an obvious opportunity for us to be of service. You cannot form a legitimate opinion on the ethics of what happened in Minnesota unless you're willing to listen to Sam Legg. Now, immediately you'll say, oh come on, you are a Jesus freak, which I will agree to, and so you were going to emulate Jesus. How well have you done it?

And I say, that's none of your business. On this one issue, or this aspect of Jesus, I've done it, never mind the rest. But that stuck, that was important to me. When Ansel Keyes retired, he was interviewed by a colleague of his at the University of Minnesota. At one point, they talk about the starvation experiment. There was evidence coming all around that at the end of the war we'd see a lot of problems

and people had been semi-starved, especially in northern countries. So I went to the Surgeon General's office and mentioned this and said, we ought to get some evidence on this. What happens when people are starved

and then refed, yeah? So the net result is that I, being an experimentalist, proposed we carry out an experiment. And we got the authorization to have conscientious objectors. The net result is that I proposed that we carry out an experiment

and we got the authorization to have conscientious objectors. Hansel Keyes, the great genius, wanted the world to know that the starvation experiment was his idea. But like so many other things about that study, the truth is more complicated. It goes back to Ansel Keys' earlier experiments with wartime volunteers, the experiments on vitamins. The conscientious objectors who are working in Keyses' lab realize that this is a military experiment, that in fact what he's doing is testing different rations that will have military applications.

And they object to that because it has a military application. Sarah Tracy, the historian writing a biography of Keyes. When she was researching her book, she stumbled across correspondence among Keyes' volunteers in the early years of the war. The men were concerned that Keyes' work was being funded by the War Department, which made them, in their own eyes, complicit in the war effort. Another idea comes to them. Well, why don't we design our own experiment? We can design an experiment that we want to do that will be of peacetime value, and then we'll get our home churches to pay for it. Oh, I didn't realize that. Nobody's realized that. Nobody's realized that. Sarah Tracy discovered that we've gotten the origin story of the starvation experiment backwards.

Here's what actually happened. A group of volunteers approached the National Service Board of Religious Objectors. They make a proposal. They point out that even if peace breaks out, the war is still going to leave millions of people starving and malnourished. What if we conducted an experiment to figure out how to help them? The service board likes the idea and funds it.

And the volunteers take that idea and the grant money to Ancel Keys. They wanted to give relief, and if they couldn't go abroad to give relief, then they could use science to determine how that relief should be given. Yeah, it's so beautiful. And now, so they come up with this idea. Yeah.

How do they phrase the idea that we will starve ourselves and then see what the best means, study the best means of bringing ourselves back to health? Yes, yes. So the people who write the recruitment brochure are the conscientious objectors themselves, the vitamin conscientious objectors, right? Those religious pacifists are doing the lion's share of legwork

when it comes to writing the recruitment brochure. How did you find that out? I found it by going to the Swarthmore College Peace Collection and combing through all their records. The brochure said, will you starve that they may be better fed with a picture of children overturning their bowls in hopes of finding one last grain of rice? I mean, they arrive in Keyes' lab and within a month or so, they're publishing their own newsletter, right? Called, it's, oh, the Guinea Pig Gazette. They publish the Guinea Pig Gazette. Okay.

Keyes published his mammoth report on the starvation experiment in 1950, years after the war was over. But the volunteers published their findings almost immediately. So it could be of use in the chaos after the war was over, but the volunteers published their findings almost immediately, so it could be of use in the chaos after the war ended. A little book called Men in Hunger, a psychological manual for relief workers. The cover shows a kindly middle-aged man shaking the hand of a gaunt European against a blighted landscape. The Minnesota experiment was not something Ansel Keys did to the volunteers. It was something the volunteers chose to do to themselves. Not everyone who suffers is a victim.

If we are at the point where we don't understand that fact, where we have a moral vocabulary for victimhood and none for self-sacrifice, then God help us. If you could turn the clock back and be back in 1940s, would you participate in the study again? Yes, without hesitation. It was a very significant event in my life. Very, very much so. If you had to make the decision to participate again or not, what would you do?

Again, I enthusiastically say, yes, I would. And I think humanity has been improved, and I'm glad I did it. We knew it wasn't going to be easy. We didn't know how hard it was going to be, but we knew it was not going to be easy, and we were prepared to suffer, and we suffered. And as far as someone taking advantage of us or mistreating us, absolutely no feelings like that at all. No resentment of any kind.

Nothing. And I guess if you could turn the clock back, would you participate again? Sure. You betcha. If you could turn the clock back, would you participate in this study again? Sure. You betcha. If you could turn the clock back, would you participate in this study again? Yes, I'm very happy that I did.

It's one of the things that I'm proud of. Would you, do you think you would make the same decision to participate? Yes. I would. No regrets. Next time on Revisionist History, the story of one more person who starved for a year so others might be fed. He had a good life. He would say he had a good life.

And what happened to him and his family after that year ended? But he paid a price for what he believed, and he kept paying that price his whole life. Revisionist History is produced by Eloise Linton, Lehman Gistu, and Jacob Smith, with Tali Emlin and Harrison Vijay Choy. Our editor is Julia Barton. Our executive producer is Mia Lobel. Original scoring by Luis Guerra, mastering by Flan Williams, and engineering by Nina Lawrence.

Beth Johnson is our fact checker. Special thanks also to Ariella Markowitz for production help on this episode. I'm Malcolm Glaba. If you target towns and cities, it's as clear as day that there will be civilian victims. In 1945, the U.S. firebombed Tokyo, destroying a quarter of the city and killing more than 100,000 people. I wrote about this infamous bombing campaign in my audiobook, The Bomber Mafia. And one of the survivors' voices we hear is from a project called Paper City. Paper City is now out as a groundbreaking feature documentary.

Director Adrian Francis explores what we choose to remember and hope to forget. To find out more, visit papercityfilm.com and follow at Paper City Tokyo on social media. Hey, Revisionist History listeners. I'm capping off this episode with a preview of a new Pushkin show

that really has me hooked. It's called Death of an Artist. Death of an Artist has all the elements of a gripping story, a suspicious death, a tumultuous relationship, a murder trial, questions of morality, feminism, power imbalance, and a divided art world. On September 8th, 1985, up-and-coming artist Ana Mendieta fell from the 34th floor window

of her husband and famous sculptor Carl Andre's apartment. Host Helen Molesworth asks, was Carl Andre involved? You'll revisit Ana's untimely death, the trial that followed, and both the protests and silence that have followed this story ever since. Okay, here comes a sneak peek. You can follow the story by searching for Death of an Artist wherever you get your podcasts. It's May 1973, Iowa City. There's a damp chill in the air. We are on a sort of shabby block in front of a brick apartment building with a white door in need of a paint job and a storefront window with its blinds drawn shut. The sidewalk just in front of the door is covered in blood and it looks like the blood

might be seeping out from under the door jamb. It's a busy weekday and as pedestrians pass the puddle of blood they notice it and casually step around it. Eventually, a man in a green and black plaid jacket pauses and looks around, as if looking for an explanation. When none comes, he walks away. Then a well-dressed white woman uses her umbrella to poke at the bloody puddle. But after a moment or two of inspection, she also walks away. Finally, an older gentleman emerges from a nearby storefront and silently cleans up the mess. And the evidence of whatever happened is suddenly gone.

And with it disappears any account of whose blood was spilled and how. The whole scene is being captured by two young women in their 20s, sisters who sit in an old car parked nearby. One of them holds a Super 8 camera, the kind you'd make home movies with back then. The other snaps photos with a 35mm camera. They are Ana and Racline Mendieta, Cuban refugees who landed in this unlikely place as children.

In 1973, Ana was a first-year MFA student at the University of Iowa. She was funny, loud, outrageous, and had a take-year MFA student at the University of Iowa. She was funny, loud, outrageous, and had a take-no-prisoners vibe. And, in the way of sisters, she had roped Raclean into helping her make a new piece. And like many works Anna made, it would come to seem tragically prophetic in the wake of her death. She basically staged what looked like the remnants of, you know, physical violence with what looked like blood in the doorway of a building, and I thought it was extremely powerful. For a very young artist to be doing that

and to be doing it in this small, largely white town of Iowa City was fascinating to me. That's Connie Butler, one of the many curators who would come to admire and study Ana Mendieta's work in the decades that followed. The photos and film the Mendieta sisters took that day would ultimately become a work of art called Moffitt Building Peace. The fact that it still exists only in these little 35-millimeter slides, which, you know, you have to get very close to with a loop, and it's a very intimate way of viewing these things, you know, that implicates you as a viewer, too, almost as if you are yourself looking at a crime scene.

Anna's interest in blood wasn't only meant to shock. She was keenly aware of violence and injustice. When she made the Moffitt building piece, she was investigating her own community's reaction to a brutal crime, a rape and murder that had happened on campus a few months before. Here's how she explained her inspiration. A young woman was killed, raped and killed at Iowa, in one of the dorms, and it just really freaked me out.

So I did several rape performances type things at that time, using my own body. I did something I believe in, and that I felt I had to do. That's not actually Ana Mendieta's voice you're hearing. That was Tanya Bruguera, another artist from Cuba, who you'll hear from more later. Ana Mendieta's question was, could you make art about something so awful? And she used blood, not paint.

Blood is the most essential substance of life. Could it jolt people out of their daily routines? Could blood make people pay attention? She didn't know it yet, but the Moffat building piece was about to be her first major artwork. And in a circular when we encounter the residue of violence. This question would haunt all of us after she died. I'm your host, Helen Molesworth, and from Pushkin Industries, Something Else, and Sony Music Entertainment, this is Death of an Artist. Episode 1, The Haunting. For my entire professional life, I've been a member of something called the Art World, an exclusive network of artists, gallery dealers, curators, collectors, and philanthropists. For two decades, I was lucky enough to be a museum curator, making me one of a small group of cultural insiders who determine

what art we see and how we talk about it. In the museum world and in art history, there are a lot of unspoken rules about what you can say publicly and what is supposed to stay private. It turns out I wasn't that good at sticking to the script. And I guess I'm still not good at it, because I'm going to tell you Ana Mendieta's whole story all the way to its shocking and troubling end. And much to my surprise, I discovered it's a story many of my colleagues in the art world would prefer I didn't tell. At first blush, it seemed like people didn't want me to talk about it because of who else is part of that story.

Anna's husband, the famous sculptor Carl Andre. He is one of the so-called fathers of minimalism, a cultural hero to many, a revered artist with lots of connections. And he was a suspect in Anna's death. Even though Carl Andre and Anna Mendieta were a highly visible art world couple, even though something terrible happened between them the night she died, you will not read about it on a museum wall label or in most art history textbooks. Reviews of their exhibitions tend to take care of it in a sentence or two. You would not know that Mendieta's death divided the art world in 1985, and in many ways still does. I'm not the first person to try and tell this story. In fact, many of the voices you'll hear

in this show are from interviews conducted by investigative journalist Robert Katz. He published a book in 1990 that remains the most comprehensive look into this art world tragedy. He spoke with dozens of Anna and Carl's friends in noisy restaurants, in parks, in busy offices. And you'll hear the voices of some art world insiders on these tapes who have since decided not to talk. Most folks don't want to discuss what happened that night. They don't want to talk about what the ramifications of that night were on the art world. They don't want to contemplate what it means when a community is torn apart by violence and they don't want to discuss whether or not justice has been served. All these different folks not talking for all of their different reasons

means that a veil of silence started to fall over this project. And I can't lie, the more silence we encountered, the more sad and frustrated I became. And the more silence we encountered, the more sad and frustrated I became. And the more silence we encountered, the more I wanted to talk.