The son of the lead scientist who carried out nutritional experiments on aboriginal children in the 1940s and '50s has defended his father's actions, saying he doesn't believe aboriginal children were starved in the name of science.

“He was just trying to do good work,” Hugh Pett said of his late father, Dr. Lionel B. Pett, who supervised the research for the precursor to Health Canada.

Hugh Pett said his father's efforts were aimed at keeping Canadians healthy at home and abroad on limited food supplies during the war.

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He also criticized Shawn Atleo, national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, for saying the experiments, carried out on 1,300 native children and adults, contributed to malnourishment among children at the controversial residential schools.

“That (allegation) to me sounds totally bizarre,” Pett said Tuesday from his home in Kelowna, B.C.

“That doesn't make sense in any age and any context. He's upset and saying things he didn't really know what actually happened.”

Pett also wants the government to release the paperwork on the experiments so that the public can better understand what his father, who died in 2003, was doing.

Details of the experiments became known following recently published research by University of Guelph food historian Ian Mosby, who discovered that federal scientists used hungry and malnourished aboriginals to study the effects of nutritional supplements.

The experiments, Mosby found, went on for a decade. Milk rations were halved in some instances. In other cases, hundreds were deprived of essential vitamins and minerals. Dental services were also denied because they affected the accuracy of the results in the experiments.

While the experiments have revealed another dark chapter in Canada's treatment of aboriginal people in the last century, they've also put the spotlight on a man who was considered a leader in his field at the time.

Born in Winnipeg in 1909, Lionel Pett was always interested in science. His father and grandfather had both been bakers, and his plan was to become a cereal chemist.

However, after attending the Ontario Agricultural College, he became interested in soil chemistry and how it related to crop production.

Pett received a master's and a PhD from the University of Toronto before moving west to teach biochemistry at the University of Alberta in 1936. By 1941, the 32-year-old Pett was named director of nutritional services for the Department of Pensions and National Health.

At the height of the Second World War, he was assigned to study how vitamins and minerals affected human productivity: what foods would go a long way to keeping Canadians healthy.

In a 1942 interview, Pett said he struggled for years to develop a plan to ensure that “everyone here in Canada (has) enough to eat.” He even advocated for a national lunchroom program to make sure children were fed properly.

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“There is no better place to make a contribution to the health of a nation than in the schools,” he said in 1944, a year after representing Canada at an international food conference. It was there that Pett helped pen a recommendation that countries should develop a national food authority and expand agriculture to deal with potential malnutrition postwar.

Under Pett's guidance, Canada became the first country in the world to gather statistics on height and weight based on a survey carried out in 1953. This data was used to create guidelines on optimal health for doctors and Canadians.

At its annual general meeting last week in Whitehorse, the Assembly of First Nations ' chiefs called on the government to provide complete access to all records regarding experiments carried out on residential school students.

The federal government has called the experiments “abhorrent” and has launched an investigation.