Vitamins
Year of Discovery: 1906
What Is It? Trace dietary chemical compounds that are essential to life and
health.
Who Discovered It? Christiaan Eijkman and Fredrick Hopkins
Why Is This One of the 100 Greatest?
We label foods by their vitamin content. We spend billions of dollars every year
buying vitamin supplements. Vitamins are essential to life and health. Yet any awareness
of vitamins—even the very notion of vitamins—is only 100 years old. It had not occurred to
anyone to search for trace elements in food that human bodies needed. They had only considered measuring the amount of food and the calories in it.
The discovery of vitamins revolutionized nutritional science and the public’s awareness of health, diet, and nutrition. It radically changed biological science and the study of
how the human body functions.
How Was It Discovered?
During the early 1890s, the disease beriberi wreaked havoc on the Dutch East India
Company’s operations in India. Since Pasteur had discovered germs, scientists assumed
that all diseases were caused by germs. Yet Company doctors could find no germ for
beriberi.
In 1896, 35-year-old Dutch physician Christiaan Eijkman traveled to India to try his
luck at the investigation. Shortly after he arrived, a massive outbreak of beriberi swept
through the flock of chickens at the research facility used for bacteriological research.
Eijkman began frantic research on the diseased flock when, just as suddenly, the disease vanished. Eijkman was baffled until he interviewed the cook who fed the chickens and
found that, just before and during the outbreak, he had switched the chickens’ feed to white
rice intended for human consumption. When company officials had yelled at him for feeding expensive polished (white) rice to chickens, the cook had switched back to normal
chicken feed using brown rice.
He found that he could cause beriberi at will by switching chicken feed to white (polished) rice and cure it by switching back. He examined local jail diets and found that where
prisoners were fed a diet of brown rice, no beriberi occurred. In jails that used white rice,
beriberi outbreaks were common.
117