As a young man living in the Netherlands during the Nazi occupation
BERNARD S. WOSTMANN felt and saw the effects of food shortages
personally. After the war he would study the body's responses
to under-nutrition, as opposed to malnutrition, and report that
there were actually health benefits to eating less than one wanted.
The immigrant, who conducted research and taught graduate students
about biology and nutrition at Notre Dame for more than 30 years,
died last December at age 84. Wostmann came to the United States
as a Rockefeller Research Fellow at the California Institute of
Technology in 1950. At Caltech he worked under, among others,
chemist Linus Pauling, who in a few years would receive the Nobel
Prize for Chemistry. In 1955 Wostmann moved to Notre Dame, living
initially in a cottage in Vetville, the campus housing area for
married war veterans. He had been hired as a researcher for the
University's Lobund Laboratory, famous for its development of
a line of rats free from bacteria. The isolation made the animals
valuable for testing biological responses absent of interference
from other organisms. Wostmann worked extensively on the nutritional
requirements of the germ-free rats, eventually developing a diet
now considered standard for lab animals. In one project, growing
out of his war-time experience, he found that if rats were fed
only 70 percent of their normal caloric intake (but all the vitamins
and minerals they needed), they were actually healthier, if ill-tempered.
Tall, dignified and self-assured, Wostmann became a researcher-missionary
of sorts for Lobund, spreading the gospel of germ-free animal
research or "gnotobiology" at conferences and institutions the
world over. He retired in 1988 and relocated to Texas to be near
family but remained connected to Lobund.
