Translating nutrition science into policy as witness and actor.

The sustained effort to witness and participate in the targeted translation of nutritional science and policy forms the structure of this narrative. The memoir starts with an early career-directing experience with nutrition and cholera and proceeds with a long thread of interest in folic acid malabsorption as one of the determinants of nutritional anemia in Asia and the tropics. The thread continues with the relationship of folate and associated vitamins to brain function and aging as a prototype of the study of the interface of aging biology and nutritional biology. My current interest in world hunger and famine and their impact on human security may circle back to studies of the great Bengal famine and the first Bangladesh survey of malnutrition.