The Scottish medical scientist John Boyd Orr, 1st Baron of Brechin (1880-1971), pioneered the science of human nutrition and developed new correlations between health, food, and poverty. He was the first director general of the Food and Agricultural Organization.

Born in Kilmaurs, Ayrshire, on Sept. 23, 1880, to a family of Covenanters, John Boyd Orr overcame the pressures of poverty in his youth by relentless work and the pursuit of greatly varied intellectual aspirations, mainly at Glasgow University. After taking his master's degree in preparation for the ministry, he turned first to science and medicine, finishing a medical degree with the prix d'honneur of the medical faculty, and then to research in metabolic diseases, for which he earned a doctoral degree.

Orr's major moral and scientific concern, deepened by close observations of life in Glasgow's slums, was the medical meaning of poverty and ignorance, notably in respect to malnutrition and...