VITAMINS 



By ALBERT SZENT-GYORGYI 



DEPARTMENT OF MEDICAL CHEMISTRY, UNIVERSITY OF SZEGED, SZEGED, HUNGARY 



To understand what vitamins have meant 

 for medical thought we should go back in 

 our thoughts to the end of the last century. 

 At this time medicine celebrated two great 

 victories. One was connected with the 

 name of Pasteur, who showed that epidemic 

 diseases were caused by positive agents, 

 micro-organisms; and it looked as if all 

 diseases must have well-defined positive 

 causes. The other victory was carried by 

 the students of nutrition, Zunz et al., who 

 brought feeding into the realm of quantita- 

 tive science by showing that food had to 

 have a certain caloric value and that if the 

 three main foodstuffs — protein, fat and 

 carbohydrate — were well balanced, all was 

 well. 



There remained in the shade of these 

 victories certain diseases, like beriberi and 

 pellagra, which still wiped out thousands of 

 lives and for which no causative agent 

 could be found. So we can understand the 

 impression caused by the observations of a 

 young Dutch doctor, Eijkman, observa- 

 tions soon completed by another Dutchman, 

 Grijns, which indicated that these diseases 

 were not caused by something positive but 

 rather by something negative — something 

 missing from food. F. G. Hopkins, who 

 continued these studies, showed that the 

 substance which was missing could be pres- 

 ent under normal conditions only in mini- 

 mal quantities which could have no caloric 

 importance. There must be something in 

 food, in minimal quantities, which keeps 

 disease away and keeps us healthy, some- 

 thing connected with the mystery of life; 

 and it seemed doubtful whether this mys- 

 terious something was a substance or rather 

 a quality of living matter. At the sugges- 

 tion of Funk these agents were called 

 "Vitamins." 



That disease could be caused by the lack 

 of something, by a deficiency, was an en- 

 tirely novel idea. I insist on this point be- 



cause even up to the present day we are 

 unable to give a more satisfactory definition 

 of vitamins than to say that they are the 

 substances that make us ill if we don't eat 

 them.^ All other things in the world make 

 us ill only if we do eat them or at least ex- 

 pose ourselves to their action. 



A great number of research workers have 

 set out to study these mysterious vitamins, 

 special laboratories have been founded, and 

 funds donated. At the beginning there 

 was naturally much controversy. The 

 smoke of these battles has blown away, and 

 the patient work of all these workers has 

 cleared up the problem. Today most of 

 these vitamins, formerly so mysterious, are 

 not only isolated but also synthesized. 

 They stand in bottles on the shelf of the 

 biochemist in one row with the other chem- 

 icals and cannot be distinguished by their 

 looks from common salt, sugar, etc. The 

 only difference may be that the chemist 

 shows them to his visitor with more pride. 



We not only have these substances in 

 hand ; we also understand them better. We 

 know that that wonderful machine, the cell, 

 is built up of many thousands of different 

 wheels, which the chemist calls molecules. 

 All of them are very small compared to the 

 objects of our daily life, but they vary 

 enormously among themselves. There are 

 small ones with the relative weight of a 

 few grams, some with the weight of a few 

 hundred, and some with the weight of 

 hundreds of thousands or millions. Of 

 some we find little in the cell, of others 

 rather much. All these wheels are equally 



1 The definition is not a complete one for there 

 are other substances, too, which make us ill if we 

 don't eat them, like tryptophane, histidine, iodine, 

 etc., etc. There is no use in dwelling upon defini- 

 tions. We all know, more or less, which substances 

 we mean by saying ' ' Vitamins, ' ' and as long as 

 we know this there is no use in giving definitions. 

 If we do not know, a definition will help little. We 

 must say, "Vitamin — ^you know what I mean." 



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