Henrik Dam (1895-1976) won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1943, along with Henry Doisy, for discovering vitamin K and elucidating its role in blood coagulation. At the time, Dam, a Danish biochemist, was staying in the United States, which he had been visiting when Nazi Germany invaded his country. During the late …
Dorothy Hodgkin was a British biochemist whose mastery of X-ray crystallography helped her elucidate the three-dimensional structures of complex organic molecules, such as cholesterol, penicillin, and insulin. Her work on the structure of vitamin B-12 earned her the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Hopkins was awarded the 1929 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for his discovery of the growth-stimulating vitamins.” Christiaan Eijkman shared the Prize “for his discovery of the antineuritic vitamin.” from Hopkins’ acceptance speech: “…Who was the “discoverer” of vitamins? This question has no clear answer. So often in the development of science, a fundamental …
Nobel Prize speech in 1929 by Frederick Gowland Hopkins Read More »
…we must sympathize with the problems of the successive Nobel Committees in Physiology or Medicine and Chemistry through the 20th century, who had to try to make their selections among many deserving people in so many different fields, among which nutritional science was only one, and “vitamins” just a portion of that.
Christiaan Eijkman carried out what historian Kenneth Carpenter called “probably the most important work for the future of nutritional science to have been conducted anywhere in the world in the 1890s.” The Dutch physician stationed in Java was assigned the task of investigating the cause of beriberi and the best method of controlling it.