Casimir Funk: The scientist who gave us the word ‘vitamin’

Casimir Funk, the Polish biochemist who coined the time period “nutritional vitamins” for the important class of molecules that assist preserve us alive, is the topic of immediately’s Google doodle.

There have been theories of how meals impacts well being for millennia. In historical Greece and Rome, early physicians invented “humoral” principle, which acknowledged that meals should have the appropriate steadiness of moist, dry, cold and warm to maintain the physique’s 4 important humours – hearth, earth, blood and phlegm – in verify. A lot later, physicians made extra distinct associations, such because the statement that consuming citrus fruits like lemons helped to stop the disease scurvy in sailors on lengthy voyages.

Within the late nineteenth century, scientists have been attempting to determine the reason for beriberi illness, which may have an effect on an individual’s nervous or cardiovascular system and is immediately often called a vitamin B1 deficiency. In 1897, Christiaan Eijkman revealed a research based mostly on experiments in chickens, proposing that diets containing brown rice have been protecting towards beriberi, in contrast with these consisting of solely white rice.

Casimir Funk learn Eijkman’s paper and set himself the duty of discovering the chemical compound that gave brown rice its protecting properties. In 1912, Funk managed to isolate a chemical that he thought was accountable and located it contained a attribute nitrogen compound known as an amine, so he named it an important amine, or vitamine. When scientists ultimately realised that nutritional vitamins didn’t essentially must comprise an amine group, they dropped the ultimate “e”.

Funk advised that related compounds would possibly exist for a lot of different “deficiency ailments”, as he known as them, writing: “We’ll converse of a beriberi and scurvy vitamine, which implies a substance stopping that particular illness.” Funk additionally accurately advised that nutritional vitamins existed that prevented the ailments pellagra and rickets.

The compound that Funk remoted and dubbed an “anti beriberi issue” was what we now name vitamin B3, or niacin, which doesn’t really forestall beriberi. Two years earlier, Japanese scientist Umetaro Suzuki remoted vitamin B1 from brown rice and accurately recognized its position in stopping beriberi. Nonetheless, his work was revealed in a Japanese journal and the primary Western translation, in German, failed to notice that it was a brand new discovery.

Within the 35 years after Funk’s preliminary discovering, scientists found the remainder of the nutritional vitamins, which quantity 13 in whole, together with eight sorts of vitamin B and nutritional vitamins A, C, D, E and Ok. Funk continued working with nutritional vitamins, and for pharmaceutical firms, for the remainder of his profession. He produced the primary extensively used vitamin focus within the US, known as OSCODAL, which accommodates liquid vitamin A and D.

Whereas nutritional vitamins are recognised as serving to to stop sure ailments, their use as dietary supplements is still debated by scientists. A recent meta-analysis discovered there isn’t good proof that dietary supplements and nutritional vitamins shield towards most cancers or coronary heart illness for most individuals.