Am  jour  Pharm  ^       jjie  Relative  Value  of  Proteins. 
Sept.,  1921.       S  J 
645 
mise  on  the  19th  of  last  April  "brought  sorrow  to  all  of  his  co-work- 
ers in  the  American  Pharmaceutical  Association.  No  higher  tri- 
bute can  be  paid  Dr,  Hynson  than  the  following  paragraph  taken 
from  an  editorial  published  in  a  recent  number  of  the  Journal  of  the 
American  Medical  Association: 
"As  already  suggested,  his  constant  effort  was  to  emphasize  as 
of  primary  importance  the  service  which  the  educated  scientific 
pharmacist  was  in  a  position  to  render  to  the  public,  and  to  decry 
the  commercial  ideas  which  seemed  to  be  strangling  the  professional 
instincts  of  the  pharmacists.  He  opposed  commercial  drug  store  ex- 
ploitation of  the  public  with  'patent  medicines'  and  making  phar- 
macy a  mere  adjacent  to  the  sale  of  soda  water,  light  lunches  and 
novelties.  Hynson  was  one  of  the  few  prominent  pharmacists  who 
were  willing  to  forego  financial  gain  in  order  to  raise  the  ethical 
standards  of  a  profession  which  he  honored.  He  took  an  earnest 
interest  in  all  the  live  pharmaceutical  questions  of  the  day,  and  pure 
pharmacy  sustained  a  great  loss  in  his  death." 
THE  RELATIVE  VALUE  OF  THE  PROTEINS  IN 
NUTRITION.* 
By  R.  H.  A.  Plimmer. 
Complete  hydrolysis  of  the  protein  to  its  constituent  18  or  26 
amino-acids  occurs  during  digestion  in  animals ;  the  amino-acids 
circulate  in  the  blood  and  reach  the  various  organs,  which  build 
up  new  tissue  from  the  units.  Animals  have  been  maintained  on  a 
diet  containing  as  its  protein  content  a  mixture  of  pure  amino-acids 
in  suitable  proportions*.  Biologically,  the  proteins  must  therefore  be 
regarded  as  mixtures  of  the  various  amino-acids,  digestion  and 
absorption  as  a  re-shuffling  of  the  units.  The  amino-acids  are  not 
convertible  into  one  another,  nor  capable  of  being  synthesised  by 
the  animal  organism,  with  the  exception  of  glycine,  which,  under 
certain  conditions,  can  be  formed  in  the  body.  The  different  pro- 
teins have  different  compositions,  thus,  for  example,  casein  contains 
16  per  cent,  of  glutamic  acid  and  gliadin  40  per  cent.  Some  pro- 
teins are  complete,  i.  e.,  contain  all  the  amino-acids,  others  are  in- 
complete and  lack  certain  units.  It  can  thus  hardly  be  expected  that 
proteins  should  have  the  same  value  in  nutrition.     Some  of  the 
*From  Journ.  Soc.  Chem.  Ind.  June  30,  1921. 
