Medicine: Funny Vitaminologist

The only vitamins which the clerk in the grocery and the cook in the kitchen know about are A for clear vision, B for sound nerves, C for healthy muscles and D for sturdy bones. Nutritionists, however, know that there are at least six kinds of vitamin B, eight D’s, three H’s and a K. Each of these should be assigned a separate letter, according to the nomenclature suggested by Casimir Funk, a Polish biochemist who in 1911 invented the word vitamin to describe these food elements essential to good health. But there are not enough letters in the English alphabet to go around. In addition to that difficulty, special students of vitamins are so bewildered by the mounting mass of facts about vitamins, that Professor Clive Maine McCay of Cornell put his tongue in his cheek and wrote for last week’s Science :

“Once upon a time life with the vitamins was simple. One drank pine needle tea (or vitamin C extract) to cure his scurvy. Now the average vitamin student is afflicted with as many alphabetical vitamins as Job was with boils.”

To remedy this accursed condition, funny Vitaminologist McCay proposed that the League of Nations begin a vitamin registry to identify vitamins by numbers. Then “when a new vitamin is to be postulated, the discoverer will need only to address a postcard to the central agency. Thus if a specific growth factor is discovered for moose by some nutrition student working in northern Ontario, he will only need address a request to the central agency. By return mail he will be assigned some number such as 1,572, and this will be recorded thenceforth. As specific properties of this number are developed, they also can be recorded, and finally the chemical formula can follow the number.”