The Vitamine Manual | Page 3

be justly attributed
the credit of calling the world's attention to the unknown substances
which Funk was to christen a little later with the name vitamines. Other
workers, of course, knew of these experiments of Eijkman and Hopkins
and in 1907 two of them, Fraser and Stanton, reported that by
extracting rice polishings with alcohol they had secured a product
which if added to the diet of a sufferer from beri-beri seemed to
produce curative effects. It is obvious that logic would have decreed
that some of these workers should be the ones to identify and name the
curative material. But history is not bound by the rules of logic and it
was so in this case. Another student had been attracted to the problem
and was working at the time in Germany where he also became
acquainted with Eijkman's results and began the investigation of rice
polishings on experimental lines. This student was Casimir Funk and a
little later he carried his studies to England where he developed the
results that made him the first to announce the discovery of the
unknown factor which he christened vitamine. Funk's studies combined
a careful chemical fractioning of the extracts of rice polishings with
tests for their antineuritic power upon polyneuritic birds, after the
manner taught by Eijkman. By carrying out this fractioning and testing
he obtained from a large volume of rice polishings a very small amount
of a crystalline substance which proved to be curative to a high degree.
A little later he demonstrated that this same substance was particularly
abundant in brewers' yeast. From these two sources he obtained new
extracts and carefully repeated his analytical fractionings. The result
was the demonstration that they contained a substance which could be

reduced to crystalline form and was therefore worthy of being
considered a chemical substance. In 1911, before Fraser and Stanton or
any other workers had been able to show to what their curative extracts
were due, Funk produced his product, demonstrated its properties and
claimed his right to naming the same. At that he barely escaped priority
from still another source. The chemists in Japan were naturally
interested in this problem and possessed an able worker by the name of
Suzuki. Suzuki and his co-workers Odake and Shimamura were
engaged in the same fractioning processes with polishings and entirely
independently of Funk or other workers they too succeeded in isolating
a curative substance and published their discovery the same year as
Funk, 1911. Their methods were later shown to be identical up to a
certain point. Suzuki called his product "Oryzanin." Funk's elementary
analyses had shown the presence of nitrogen in this product and his
method of extraction indicated that this nitrogen was present in basic
form. For that reason he suggested that his product belonged to a class
of substances which chemists call "amines." Since its absence meant
death and its presence life what more natural than to call it the
Life-amine or Vita-amine. This is the origin of Funk's nomenclature.
Both Funk's original crystals and Suzuki's oryzanin were later shown to
be complexes of the curative substances combined with adulterants and
we do not yet know just what a vitamine is or whether it is an amine at
all but no one since 1911 has been able to get any nearer to the
identification than Funk and while he has added much data to his
earlier studies he has himself not yet given us the pure vitamine. For
that reason it has been suggested by various people that the name
vitamine should not be used since it has no sufficient evidence to
support it. Hopkins of England had suggested the name "accessory food
factors." E. V. McCollum holds that we should call them the
"unidentified dietary factors" and added later to this phrase, the terms
water-soluble "B" and fat-soluble "A" after the fat soluble form was
discovered. Most chemists feel, however, that the purpose of
nomenclature is brevity combined with ready recognition of what you
are discussing and that it is unnecessary to change the name vitamine
until we know exactly what the substances are. The result is that while
still a mystery chemically they remain under the name of vitamine and

the kinds are distinguished by the McCollum terms "fat-soluble" A,
"water-soluble" B, and "C."
We see that beri-beri then was responsible for Funk's adding to our
chemical entities a new member but it does not yet appear why this
entity concerns our normal nutrition. To get this relation we must turn
for a moment to the state of knowledge in 1911 in regard to foods and
their evaluation and what was going on in this field of study at the time.
A great advance in measuring food value was the discovery of the
isodynamic law. Translated into