In 1902, U.S. government chemist Harvey Wiley began recruiting healthy young men for an unusual experiment.
Their assignment?
Eat food containing measured amounts of chemical preservatives and see what happened.
The substances tested included borax, benzoates and formaldehyde, among others. The men ate carefully controlled meals while Wiley and his team monitored the effects.
The press gave the volunteers a considerably better name than their official designation:
The Poison Squad.
And their dining room reportedly displayed an equally reassuring slogan:
“None but the Brave Can Eat the Fare.”
Wiley was the chief chemist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Chemistry, an early predecessor of today’s FDA. At the time, chemical preservatives were increasingly being added to foods, but there was relatively little evidence about what consuming them might do to human health. Congress gave Wiley $5,000 in 1902 to investigate.
The experiments would obviously raise some eyebrows under modern research-ethics standards.
But they also became a national sensation.
Newspapers covered the Poison Squad extensively, helping draw public attention to food adulteration and the largely unregulated American food supply. Wiley’s research became one of several forces that built momentum for federal food regulation.
In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Pure Food and Drugs Act, which prohibited interstate commerce in adulterated and misbranded foods and drugs and became a foundation of modern federal food and drug regulation. Wiley’s work and advocacy played an important role in its passage.
More than a century later, the Poison Squad is a strange little piece of public-health history.
Human experimentation.
Borax for dinner.
Five dollars a month.
And, apparently, no shortage of volunteers.
I can’t help but think about that kid everyone knew growing up who would do almost anything for a dollar.
Yeah.
I bet he would’ve joined the Poison Squad. ;)
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Check Out: When Kids Were Paid to Kill Flies
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