Index Uproar

The Bulletin Index is a pert weekly published in Pittsburgh and mainly concerned with Pittsburgh affairs. Last week its editors printed an indignant story (which they privately regarded as a great scoop) about a scientific "miscarriage of justice" which was incidentally an outrage to Pittsburgh's civic pride.

The 1937 Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded to Albert Szent-Gyoergyi, a peripatetic Hungarian who extracted a substance called ascorbic acid from adrenal glands and plants and later identified this acid with Vitamin C (TIME Nov. 8). Szent-Gyoergyi's long researches on carbohydrate metabolism and oxidation also counted with the committeemen, but that they were largely preoccupied with Vitamin C this year was shown when they split the Prize for Chemistry between Haworth of England who mapped the vitamin's complex molecular structure, and Karrer of Switzerland who synthesized it. The Index's point was that a shy, soft-spoken U. S. chemist, Dr. Charles Glen King of the University of Pittsburgh, was the first to isolate Vitamin C and recognize it as such, that he announced his isolation in 1932, three weeks before Szent-Gyoergyi announced his.

The story was ferreted out by an Index reporter who was once an instructor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. With the help of King's friends, he traced the history of the vitamin in scientific journals. Dr. King's work, well-known and highly regarded among biochemists, was described two years ago in Outposts of Science, an omnibus of science for laymen by Bernard Jaffe (a chemist himself). Jaffe unequivocally credited King and his coworker, William A. Waugh, with first obtaining the pure vitamin: "On April 4, 1932, after seven years of continuous work, King finally isolated fifty milligrams from one litre of lemon juice, and identified the pure crystals. . . . Before scientists gathered at a meeting of the American Society of Biological Chemistry at Philadelphia, King described his method and exhibited some of the crystals. Mc-Collum,* who was in the audience, rose to give King his scientific blessing for having made a great scoop for American Chem-istry."

*Elmer Verner McCollum, Johns Hopkins' great vitamin pioneer.

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