250 Miracles Ahead! 



and prevents them from having offspring. Purified amino acids 

 have recently become available for experiment and scientists 

 believe they deserve more attention as factors in the promo- 

 tion of good health and vigor. 



Nature's Most Powerful Vitamin 



The synthesis of biotin, nature's most powerful vitamin and 

 one of the rarest and costliest substances, promises to open up 

 many new fields. The synthesis is considered one of the great- 

 est achievements in modern chemistry and was accomplished 

 at the research laboratories of Merck & Co., Rahway, New 

 Jersey, by Dr. Stanton A. Harris, Dr. Donald E. Wolf, Dr. 

 Ralph Mozingo, and Dr. Karl Folkers. 



This supervitamin is a member of the family of B vitamins, 

 which include several whose names are very well known to 

 the general public: thiamin, riboflavin, niacin. The world's 

 entire supply of biotin, so far extracted largely from liver, 

 amounts to about one-tenth of an ounce. It was so costly and 

 rare that only minute amounts were available to research 

 workers, who paid for it at the rate of four million dollars an 



ounce! 



In 1936 Professor Fritz Koegel and Dr. B. Toennis of 

 Utrecht, Holland, succeeded in extracting i.i milligrams of 

 the pure substance. They got this infinitesimal amount from 

 five hundred and fifty pounds of dried yolks of duck eggs 

 imported from China. It was so potent that one part in five 

 hundred billion could still function as a growth-promoting 

 factor for yeast. One gram dissolved in twenty-five million 

 gallons of water would be strong enough for the life needs 

 of bacteria. 



Yeast and bacteria need this supervitamin. And so do all 

 higher forms of life, including man. The bacteria that make 

 the nitrogen in the air available to plants also cannot live with- 



