The concept of vitamins is a hundred years old this year.
During the late 19th century, there were outbreaks of fatal beriberi in East Asia. The study of this disease would lead to the discovery of vitamins. Kanehiro Takaki, a doctor in the Japanese navy, took a special interest in the disease. The navy was plagued by illness: between 1878 and 1881, in a sample of a thousand men, each man in the navy fell ill an average of four times every year, and beriberi accounted for a third of the cases. Takaki noticed that beriberi was common on some ships and rare on others, and set out trying to find why. He noticed that the disease was uncommon among higher-ranking officers, and more common among sailors; after eliminating other factors, he became convinced that the cause lay in their diet.
In the 1880s, the germ theory of disease was the new kid on the block, only verified and commonly accepted in the last few decades. Ignaz Semmelweis had discovered in the 1840s that requiring physicians to wash their hands after examining dead bodies and before examining living patients reduced the incidence of puerperal fever. John Snow traced the source of a 1854 cholera outbreak in London to contaminated drinking water, thus disproving the prevailing “miasmal” theory of disease (that disease was caused by noxious air). Robert Koch had identified the bacterium responsible for anthrax in 1875. It was only natural to look for a bacterial cause of beriberi. But none could be found.
Takaki found that by introducing a more varied diet to the sailors, who mostly ate polished rice, beriberi was eliminated almost completely.
Around the same time, in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), Christian Eijkman noticed that hens fed polished rice developed beriberi-like symptoms. The disease could be cured by feeding them rice bran. Adolphe Vorderman continued this work by studying beriberi in prisons on Java. He found that it was common in prisons that served mostly white rice, but extremely rare in prisons that served unpolished rice. Beriberi wasn’t caused by some bad substance introduced to the patients; it was caused by the lack of a good substance the body needs. By 1900, beriberi was believed to be a deficiency disease, and it turns out that it isn’t the only one.
Finally, the Polish biochemist Casimir Funk did a series of chemical studies of the magic substance in rice bran that could cure beriberi. He found it to contain nitrogen. In 1912, he published a paper called The Etiology of the Deficiency Diseases. In it, he presents the idea that there is a certain class of amines (derivatives of ammonia, or NH3) the body needs, but can’t synthesize itself: hence the need to introduce them through our diet. We only need tiny amounts of these substances, but if we lack them, we get sick. Funk called these compounds vital amines, or vitamines.
As it turns out, not all vitamins are amines, but the name stuck. We now know that beriberi is caused by thiamine (vitamin B1) deficiency. Scurvy is caused by vitamin C deficency, and pellagra by the lack of niacin (vitamin B3).
Eijkman shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work. Today, of course, nutritional science holds a prominent place in medicine and the public consciousness, and we all know how important a healthy and varied diet is. But we learned all this in the last hundred years. It isn’t longer since the time doctors couldn’t even imagine that a limited diet might cause disease.
I think this story also underlines the cooperative and cumulative aspects of science. None of the scientists mentioned in this post could have discovered vitamins on their own, yet all of them provided necessary pieces of the puzzle. This is one of the reasons science needs to be open, transparent and accessible to as many people as possible.
dailymeh posted this on January 5, 2012
