Ancel Keys - Early Life

Early Life

Ancel Keys was born in Colorado Springs in 1904 to teenage parents and in 1906, they moved to San Francisco before the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake struck. Shortly after the disaster, his family relocated to Berkeley where he grew up. His intellect was well-known ever since a young age as Lewis Terman, noted psychologist, prominent eugenicist, and inventor of the Stanford-Binet IQ Test identified Keys as one of the 1528 intellectually "gifted" students that he studied at Stanford. During his youth, he left high school to pursue odd jobs such as shoveling bat guano in Arizona, working as a powder monkey in a Colorado mine, working in a lumber camp and even working as a crewmember on a ship to China. He eventually finished his secondary education and was admitted to the University of California at Berkeley in 1922.