Conversations from the Hall of Fame

Janet C . King, nutrition scientist, interviewed 2007

(Time: ~12:01 minutes)

My title is a senior scientist at Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute. I'm also a professor at UC Berkeley and UC Davis. I was with the ARS for eight years. I began in 1995 and I retired in 2003. 

I was born in a small town in Iowa, Red Oak, Iowa. I grew up on a farm was very much involved in the farm work as any small farm family is. Learned how to drive a tractor the very early age and was out working in the fields, so my roots are definitely in agriculture. 

My interest in science actually developed as a high school student because I had a fantastic chemistry professor in high school that just opened up a whole new world to me and I decided I wanted to go to college and study chemistry. My mother wasn't quite sure that it was appropriate at that time for a woman to become a chemist and she found an article in Life magazine that suggested that if your daughter is interested in chemistry she should think about becoming a dietitian. So I went to Iowa State University and studied dietetics and because my family was pretty poor there was very little money to support my college education so during my junior year I joined the Army to help pay for college expenses. 

This meant that I had an obligation to the Army afterwards. So after I graduated from college I knew when to Walter Reed General Hospital and in my dietetic internship there actually was a dietitian there the day that Kennedy was killed so was the very shocking time to be in Washington. 

From there I went to Fitzsimmons Colorado and worked with a dietitian at that hospital but at that time the Army was really the only group doing human nutrition research it hadn't become an area of metabolic studies yet in universities and so all of the research on nutrition was being done by the Army. So I was assigned to their research labs and became totally fascinated by the research process and this lead me to graduate school so I applied to two universities, Berkeley and Ohio State. I got into both. I went to UC Berkeley because of a particular professor there that I wanted to work with, Dr Doris Callaway.

My research is focused on human nutrition for the last thirty plus years. My main interest is how what you eat affects metabolism within your body and how metabolism is also affected by pregnancy. So I basically carried on two lines of research for the past thirty years in the area of pregnancy I've been studying how the mother of adapts her metabolism to take care of the nutritional needs of the fetus and we've learned that how she does that varies with how much body fat she has at conception.

If she's a thin woman and doesn't have enough to eat she will reduce her own energy expenditure to conserve energy for the fetus. If she's a thin woman that has enough to eat she'll keep her energy expenditure about the same but if she's overweight or obese when she conceives and has an ample supply of food she actually wastes energy during her pregnancy gets rid of excess energy so that the fetus can develop a more normal environment. 

The other area of research I worked in is on the metabolism of zinc an essential trace element in the diet found primarily in red meat also in oysters and in legumes. We've learned it's very difficult to figure out how much zinc a person needs because when your diet is reduced because you are not eating those foods the body has a tremendous capacity to adapt to a low zinc intake and maintain a normal functions. This is probably because zinc that is needed for normal DNA synthesis of cell division,  the basic functions of life and so we've been endowed with a tremendous capacity to adapt to how much is available in our diet.
I've always been very interested in making sure that my research has some practical implications. This may be because I began working in a hospital as a dietitian for four years before I went to graduate school and could see all of the effects firsthand of not eating well so when I went into research I wanted to do something that would improve the quality of life for Americans and I think that's why I have focused on the two areas that I work in pregnancy because this is the beginning of life you want to make sure the mother has the most ideal diet possible and zinc because it's one of the most limiting nutrients world wide. We think that probably over a third of the people in the world are in marginal zinc status and is one of the major causes of growth retardation and early death in infants and children. So I've been trying to work in those two areas to enhance the availability to zinc-rich foods and also a good quality of diet during pregnancy.

Consequently I have been able to serve on a number of committees. The National Academy of Sciences that deal with taking basic science and converting it into recommendations for the public and also have  served on the dietary guidelines committee which takes the knowledge that we know about nutrient  requirements and translate it into recommendations for food that we should eat.

I'm the third human nutritionist to be inducted into Hall of Fame and the two that precede me were mentors to me early in my career so I feel particularly privileged to have received this award, Doctor Hamish Monroe was a protein chemist an  nutritionist and I studied protein requirements early in my career and he was very helpful to me at that time. The other nutritionist in the Hall of Fame is Dr Walter Mertz who studied zinc nutrition and he too gave me a lot of advice and assistance so I owe those two previous inductees a lot.

Advice to Young Scientists 

I think it s a young scientist if I think back to what helped me the most I would like to suggest a comment that was made to me by my major professor when I came to her with my first set of data from an experiment that I had completed and I had looked at the data and I had drawn a very typical conclusion and she looked at me and she said, "Well Janet now you've come up with the obvious is go back and think about what else it might mean." And basically she was telling me to think beyond the obvious information,  to read widely, to study all aspects of the literature and try to put a story around the data that would advance the field rather than just contributing to what we already know and so my advice to young scientists would be to stretch themselves a little bit don't be afraid to try new things do something that's a little bit beyond where your field is at this point in time because in that way you can be more confident of making some new discoveries and some contributions.

I was fortunate in that I developed a new method during my first years as a professor at Berkeley and after developing that method that really advanced my career I thought, "This is wonderful now I've got a novel method and I can use it for the rest of my life I don't have to worry about coming up with something new and novel any more. That is totally wrong. You cannot rest on those kinds of accomplishments. You need to keep seeking new directions, new approaches, new information in order to advance your field.

Another thing that I think is very important is to listen and to not be afraid to collaborate with people outside their field that's the way you can learn and bring new information to your area of research.

I think sometimes we tend to get isolated. Scientists often are a little introverted and things in their own laboratories and forget about seeking outside collaborators but I feel that one aspect of the success of my research program has been my opportunities to collaborate with scientists from all other disciplines physics, physiology and medicine, basic biology, cell biology and always working with somebody that I thought was quite a lot smarter than me and that really helped to.