Wilbur O. Atwater, the famed chemist and Wesleyan professor who is responsible for establishing the food calorie in global scientific and health culture, and who placed humans in a type of metabolism cage called a respiration calorimeter to study the metabolic properties of the human body. Scientists, like Atwater and his close colleague Edward Rosa, who placed human beings into metabolism cages in the laboratory drew upon the social categories attached to the systems to carry out their research, categories that carried politically charged meanings out in the field.
