Deborah Blum

There were not just Wiley's, you know, I Wonder What's In It, but poems written about it.

You can find the host of the most incredible cartoons.

You know, they were throwing up.

They were losing weight.

They felt incredibly off.

Wiley, he hadn't expected that to happen.

And he said, which really stuck with me, that that was the experiment that changed the way he saw things.

the entire program because it was the one that convinced him that they had been underestimating, not overestimating, but underestimating how dangerous this was.

That these compounds that everyone was just like, oh yeah, this is part of the daily diet when you added them up as he was doing.

were much more dangerous than he had expected.

And you see the tone of his messaging change after the Borax experiment.

And you see the tone of the way newspapers are covering this change, right?

The Post had really wrote some early articles in which they kind of saw this as high comedy, you know.

men agreeing to sit around a table and dine dangerously and, you know, these food adventurers and all that.

But by the time the Borax results come out, they're just not even messing around.

They're saying, ate poison.

Professor Wiley was feeding his volunteers poison.

And the message to the American public then is you're eating poison every day.

you're starting to see this sort of shift in public attitude in which people are actually hearing this and realizing, I really think for the first time, just how dangerous this was and that they might be poisoning their children.

And so you start to get this sort of, I always think of it as a low-simmering public fire.