Medicine: Death of the Vitamin Pioneer

NUTRITION

Death of the Vitamin Pioneer

Of the three most salient drug advances of the 20th century, vitamins, hormonal medicine and antibacterial “wonder” drugs, the first continues to lead the list in everyday importance. Last week Dr. Casimir Funk, the quiet biochemist whose research ranged through two of these fields and led him to the discovery of vitamins in 1911, died of cancer at 83 in Albany, N.Y.

Born a dermatologist’s son in Warsaw in 1884, Dr. Funk left Switzerland’s Bern University in 1904 with a Ph.D. in chemistry and began his research at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, moving on to London’s Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine in 1910. He pursued the causes of beriberi, the deficiency disease that attacks the nerves, heart and digestive system. Beriberi was particularly prevalent in those days among Eastern peoples whose diet consisted mainly of polished rice.

Funk put test pigeons on a rice diet. First he fed them polished rice; then natural rice, with all its bran coating. When the pigeons got the coating they thrived; when they did not they suffered from polyneuritis. Obviously, the bran-fed pigeons were getting a nutrient that the others were not. Funk concentrated the nutrient, now known as vitamin B1.

Preventing Disease. From this discovery, Funk correctly theorized that chemical substances which he named vitamines (from the Latin vita for life and amine for chemical compounds containing nitrogen) were capable of preventing deficiency diseases such as scurvy, pellagra and rickets, and indeed were essential to the sustenance of healthy life. The assumption that all vitamins contain nitrogen later proved wrong, and the e was dropped.

Other men* identified, isolated and synthesized vitamins that Funk’s discovery presaged. Meanwhile, the slender, 5-ft. 6-in. research scientist focused his intense curiosity on other fields. He moved to the U.S. in 1915 to do cancer research at Cornell University Medical College, became a citizen in 1920. In 1923 he returned to Poland as director of the State Institute of Hygiene. Moving to Paris in 1928, he extended man’s knowledge of sex hormones.

Keeping Fit. Returning to the U.S. at the start of World War II, Funk continued his cancer research, later theorized that oncotine and oncostimuline affect the growth of tumors, and postulated that an imbalance of the two might cause the disease. All the while, he retained more than a proprietary interest in nutrition, served as a research consultant to the U.S. Vitamin & Pharmaceutical Corp., helped develop artificial vitamins.

Funk believed it was preferable for a person to obtain his daily requirement of vitamins from natural foodstuffs. “I get the vitamins I need from eating the right foods,” he once said, and his fitness attested to the claim. Nonetheless, he maintained that such factors as bad soil and poor cooking made artificial vitamins not only necessary but “sometimes indispensable.”

* Including Dr. E. V. McCollum, a discoverer of vitamin A (1913), who died recently at 88 (TIME, Nov. 24).