Rickets, a disease of vitamin D deficiency, is rarely confronted by the practicing pediatrician in the United States today. At the turn of the 20th century, rickets was rampant among the poor children living in the industrialized and polluted northern cities of the United States. With the discovery of vitamin D and the delineation of …
From the publisher: The first modern survey of the long and fascinating history of the various ideas and theories about the cause of scurvy, the nutritional deficiency disease that has caused (with the exception of famine) the most human suffering in recorded history.
Linus Pauling: I conclude that the optimum daily requirement of ascorbic acid for a human being requiring 2500 kcal of food energy is about 2.3 g (2300 mg) (2.6 g for an adult male, and 2.0 g for an adult female), or is greater than this amount.
If one were looking for a test of the effectiveness of the new significant scientific agreement standard specified in the 1990 Nutrition Labeling and Education Act, no one would have to look much farther than the history of folic acid fortification to find evidence that less can be more in the rapidly changing landscape of …
Lucy Wills was a British physician who discovered in the late 1920s and early 1930s that something in yeast cured macrocytic anemia. Called the “Wills Factor,” the substance was later identified as the B vitamin folate.
CONCLUSIONS: In the 70 years since Lucy Wills’ original discovery that yeast extract contained a factor to which macrocytic anaemia of pregnancy responds, many aspects of folate metabolism and the role of folate deficiency in causing megaloblastic anaemia have been elucidated.
Charles Glen King and his colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh were the first to isolate vitamin C in 1932, but the credit and Nobel Prize went to Hungary’s Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, a source of lifelong disappointment for King.
Bob Stokstad isolated folic acid in pure crystalline form in 1943 while working at Lederle Laboratories in Pearl River, New York.
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.
Thomas Jukes identified the B vitamin pantothenic acid from studying purified diets in chickens in the 1930s at the University of California at Davis. For 20 years, he worked at the pharmaceutical company Lederle Laboratories where he helped develop the anti-folate cancer drug methotrexate and discovered that subtherapeutic doses of antibiotics could stimulate the growth …
Paul Gyorgy was a Hungarian-American pediatrician who helped discover three vitamins–riboflavin (B-2), pyridoxine (B-6), and biotin–while working in Heidelberg, Germany, Cambridge, England, and Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.
Roger J. Williams was an American biochemist who discovered the B-vitamin pantothenic acid and who directed the Clayton Foundation Biochemical Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, where much early research on B vitamins was conducted.
Victor Herbert was a hematologist, Army veteran of four wars, and a staunch opponent of what he considered health fraud. His self-experimentation demonstrating that folate deficiency results in anemia is documented in Lawrence Altman’s book “Who Goes First?”
Harry Steenbock was a Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who showed that irradiation by ultraviolet light increased the vitamin D content of foods and other organic materials. Steenbock patented his invention with his own money, then donated the patent to the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), which he helped start. WARF licensed …
Vedder was a career U.S. military physician who while stationed in the Philippines helped demonstrate that beriberi was a nutrient deficiency disease. In 1913, he published Beriberi, his best known monograph. On his return to the United States, he undertook research on scurvy.
