Vitamin D

The first vitamin ever to be lassoed and corralled has been isolated by Dr. Walter H. Eddy, Professor of Physiological Chemistry in Teachers' College, Columbia University. The nutrition experts have known a lot about vitamins for years, without being able to touch, taste, see, hear or smell them; some unfeeling sceptics have insinuated that it was all moonshine. But Dr. Eddy showed a group of his colleagues four test tubes containing 70 milligrams of a crystalline substance, Vitamine D, which he prefers to call by the name of "bios" first used by Professor Wildiers, of the University of Louvain, Belgium, in 1900. It was extracted from a solution of autolyzed (self-digested) yeast. It is an organic chemical structure composed of 43% carbon, 25% nitrogen, 8% hydrogen and 24% not yet completely analyzed.

Collaborating with Dr. Eddy are Dr. R. R. Williams, chemist of the Western Electric Company, and Dr. Ralph Kerr, of the department of organic chemistry at Columbia. They are now working to produce the new vitamin synthetically. Their work may lay a basis for future synthetic foods to form a scientific diet, though the authentic vitamin scientists have nothing but condemnation for the various commercial tablets, cakes, etc., now on the market. The best diet can still be secured from natural foods.

In 1897 a Dutch scientist named Eijkman discovered that fowls contract a certain disease like beriberi if fed upon polished rice; that they can be cured by feeding them the part of the rice grain removed in polishing. In 1911 Casimir Funk, a Pole, proposed the name vitamine for this essential substance, whatever it was. Since that time vitamin has followed vitamin in quick succession--mainly discovered in U. S. laboratories. The orthodox three are "Fat-soluble A," "Water-soluble B," and "Water-soluble C." Then. there is Vitamin X," the reproductive vitamin. And lately many investigators have been working on a new trail-- that of "Vitamin D."

Wildiers discovered over 20 years ago that the micro-organisms of yeast will grow rapidly in beer wort, but not in artificial media. He called the unknown agent of growth "bios" in a book called La Cellule. In 1916 Dr. Williams suggested that the substance previously called Vitamin B was identical with Wildiers' "bios." Extracts of some substances known to be rich in B stimulate yeast growth, and many substances have been tested for yeast stimulation as a means of measuring their B content.

But in 1921 Funk and Dubin showed that the yeast-stimulating power might be merely accidentally associated with Vitamin B. When an extract rich in B is shaken with Fuller's earth all its anti-neuritic power (power to cure beriberi, the chief characteristic of Vitamin B) is removed, though it continues to stimulate yeast. Funk therefore proposed that Vitamin B was really two vitamins--B, the anti-neuritic, and D, the yeast-stimulating. Dr. E. V. McCollum, of Johns Hopkins University, one of the pioneer American investigators of vitamins, has also used the term Vitamin D for a factor present in cod-liver oil that prevents rickets.

Dr. W. Lash Miller, of the University of Toronto (TIME, Jan. 14) and Dr. E. J. Fulmer, of Iowa State College, working on the "bios" problem, with G. H. Lucas and others, found that "bios" was divisible into two substances, "Bios I" and "Bios II,"* both stimulating yeast growth in some measure, although not necessarily indispensable to it. They disagree with Eddy and Williams as to the identity of the "bioses" with Vitamin B, having made experiments which seem to disprove any constant relation, although both are frequently present in the same food. McCollum believes the term vitamin should be reserved for nutritional factors absolutely essential to the growth of mammals rather than for those factors merely highly stimulatory to organic life.

From the history of past acrimonious controversies on this subject, it is clear that Dr. Eddy will not succeed in convincing all workers in the field of his achievement without herculean arguments. Knowledge has grown so rapidly that two or three years renders many notions obsolete.

The layman who wants to know what it is all about can find several admirable recent books on the subject, including Dr. Eddy's own The Vitamine Manual Funk's The Vitamines, McCollum's The Newer Knowledge of Nutrition (all more or less ex parte for their own theories) ; Harrow's Vitamines: Essential Food Factors and Sherman and Smith's The Vitamins. There is an up-to-date chapter by Eddy in Caldwell and Slosson's Science Remaking the World.

* In his latest paper on the subject (Science, Feb. 29, 1924) Dr. Miller says that Bios II has been "fractionated," so that there are three separate constituents.