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Crystal Ball series

Crystal Ball: Walter Willett

European Journal of Clinical Nutrition volume 73, pages 491–494 (2019)Cite this article

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I’ve been privileged to know, learn from, and work with many wonderful and amazing people throughout my personal and professional life, and the broad area of nutrition is a thread that connects many of them. The Willett family has been dairy farming in Michigan for about 140 years. My father built on this tradition to become a reproduction physiologist and to head the Rockefeller Research Center on dairy genetics in Madison, Wisconsin. Thus, I spent my early years on a research farm and learned how to milk a cow and count motile sperm before I was five. We moved back to Michigan when I was eleven when my father took a faculty position at Michigan State University in the Dairy Department, but unfortunately he died shortly thereafter of a brain tumor. As the oldest of four children, I had responsibility for a large vegetable garden and participated in multiple 4-H vegetable clubs (4-H is an organization for rural youth). I won many blue ribbons for vegetables at our county fair, and one year also won the Michigan contest in vegetable grading sponsored by the National Junior Vegetable Growers Association. The reward was a trip to the national convention in Florida and tours of Florida agricultural systems; this was a great experience as I had not had a chance to travel outside the Midwest before.

Because Michigan State University was close by, I enrolled there and initially majored in physics, in part inspired by a neighbor who was head of that department who also became a surrogate father. I enjoyed math and the rigor of physics, but felt it was too constraining as I had a sense of adventure and wanted to be engaged in a wider world. However, what I learned in my physics studies has continued to be valuable because much of that field is about measurement, assessing measurement error, and careful observation; all of this is at the core of what I have done subsequently. From physics, I transferred to food science in the Agriculture school at Michigan State, which I enjoyed as it connected multiple strands of science with food and global issues. Among the faculty members who challenged my thinking was Georg Borgstrom, who wrote The Hungry Planet, which already in the 1960’s described the unsustainable stresses that food systems were putting on ecosystems.

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  1. Department of Nutrition, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, 665 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA, 02115, USA

    Walter C. Willett

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  1. Walter C. Willett
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Correspondence to Walter C. Willett.

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Willett, W.C. Crystal Ball: Walter Willett. Eur J Clin Nutr 73, 491–494 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41430-018-0279-7

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