Nobel Prizemen

Many a guarded aspiration toward scientific fame subsided last week upon the awarding of the 1929 Nobel Prize in Medicine. Joint winners were Professor Frederick Gowland Hopkins of Cambridge University and Professor Christian Eijkman of the University of Utrecht. Both men pioneered in proving the existence, usefulness, necessity of vitamins in nutrition.

Vitamins are substances of very complicated chemical structure. They appear in certain foodstuffs in minute quantities. Their absences from food causes certain deficiency diseases. Although six vitamins are now definitely recognized,* only since 1912 have they been called vitamins. Now the public knows so much of their values that food manufacturers make special points of advertising vitaminized products.

As far back as the 1880's scientists were studying the effects and values of foods. Their predecessors had believed that pure carbohydrates, proteins and fats alone were sufficient nutrition to supply an animal with its essential energy, to provide it with material for new growth, to replace its waste tissue. Researchers, including Dr. Hopkins, discovered that animals fed on "pure" diets lost weight and died. He found (1906) that a little milk in the diet kept the animals from dying and concluded that the milk must contain some unknown ingredient (vitamin).

In the 1890's the Dutch Government assigned Dr. Eijkman to study causes of beriberi, a polyneuritis which was afflicting Dutch subjects in Java. He observed that the sick Javanese subsisted mainly on polished rice. He observed too that fowls suffered from an analogous polyneuritis and were feeding largely on polished rice. Putting many two's together he concluded that milling and polishing rice must remove some diet essential. He took some "silverskin" (rice pericarp) chaff, soaked it in water and fed the mash to sick fowls. They speedily recovered. Humans also recovered. Thus he showed that eating whole rice was a preventive against beriberi. As preliminary reward his colleagues made him professor of hygiene and legal medicine at the University of Utrecht.

Dr. Hopkins followed up Dr. Eijkman's early work on "pure" diets and vitamins. But more importantly he showed paths for others to follow. In 1913 Cambridge University made him its first professor of biochemistry. Here he made his fundamental contribution to science: by isolating from living cells the sulphur-containing peptide glutathione and demonstrating its great importance for the oxidation processes of the cells. King George made him a knight four years ago.

Many a U. S. nutritionist declared last week, without carping at the Nobel award to Professors Hopkins and Eijkman, that, if a future Nobel Prize for vitamin research is made, it should go to Professor Elmer Verner McCollum, 50, head of the department of chemical hygiene at Johns Hopkins school of hygiene & public health. He too was an early revealer of the vitaminic essentials for diet.

*Vitamin A prevents the eye disease xerophthalmania; Vitamin B3 prevents beriberi in man and polyneuritis in fowl; Vitamin B2 prevents pellagra; Vitamin C prevents scurvy; Vitamin D prevents rickets; Vitamin E prevents sterility.