The word vitamin was unheard of before 1911 but 1500 years before the birth of Christ people knew that simply feeding
a sick person a particular food could cure certain diseases. Early scientists who searched for the mysterious substances
in food would have found nothing funny about nutrition. These men and their writings were ridiculed and harassed
by contemporary scientists for believing there were certain unknown elements that were sometimes absent in the
best of diets. The worst was they were unable to determine the composition of those unknown ingredients. While
foods contain large quantities of carbohydrates, fats and proteins, vitamins are present in minute amounts, making
them difficult to isolate and identify. Despite the scorn heaped upon them, several pioneers persevered and eventually
succeeded.
Near the beginning of the 20th Century, Frederick Hopkins stated that
foods contain a small amount of "growth factors" needed to sustain growth and life itself. The growth
factors were defined as (1) substances found to be absolutely necessary for life (vital) and which (2) the body
cannot synthesize on its own.
Several years after Hopkins published his beliefs about the unidentified
growth factors, a Polish-born chemist named Casimir Funk successfully isolated a growth factor from rice husks.
Funk said that the growth factors should be called "vitamines" because they were required for life (vita)
and because he found that the substance he'd isolated contained nitrogen (amine).
Following Funk's success, there was a flurry of activity with vitamin
research and some confusing Greek names started cropping up. Scientists interested in vitamines decided to have
a meeting so the name game wouldn't get out of hand.
At the meeting one of the scientists stood up and said, "carbohydrate,
fat and protein nomenclature is laborious and confusing. I suggest we give the vitamines simple names that students
and professors can remember and pronounce." The idea was accepted amid thunderous applause.
After some discussion and voting, the scientists decided to name the
vitamines with letters of the alphabet in order of discovery. They named a substance not made in the body and needed
to prevent blindness and keep their wives' skin soft vitamine A but then somebody reminded them Dr. Funk's vitamine
had been discovered earlier. Following some deliberation, the scientists decided Casimir wouldn't mind so they
stayed with their first decision. Retinol became vitamine A, and Funk's vitamine was named B.
The scientists were happily smoking their pipes and tacking on alphabetical
names when somebody yelled, "Whoa! Back up here. There are only twenty-six letters in the alphabet. How do
we know there aren't more than twenty six vitamines?" This was met with much consternation and deliberation
until a decision was made to use subscripts with each of the letters beginning with B. Dr. Funk's vitamine was
renamed vitamine B1 and the meeting went on. A few years later at another meeting, the scientists dropped the subscript
system when they figured there would be enough letters in the alphabet. By the time of that meeting vitamines B1,
B2, B3, B5, B6 and B12 were the only B vitamines to pass muster. B vitamines four, seven, eight, nine, ten and
eleven were discarded as not meeting the criteria. And so it was in 1935 the antiscurvy vitamine was called simply
vitamine C.
After scientists identified, purified, and synthesized all of the vitamins,
there was another big meeting where the attendees learned many of the vitamines do not contain nitrogen. The scientists
decided to change Funk's original term "vitamine" to vitamin. Also, it was announced a couple of the
vitamins, vitamin D and B5, can actually be made in the body but not in the amounts necessary to maintain health.
They also decided to classify the vitamins as either water-soluble if they floated around in the blood all day
or fat-soluble if they ended up in gobs of lipid (the correct term for fat) in and around body organs.
Funk might have mixed up with his name proposal but we have to admire
Casimir for what he didn't do. Back in the days when there was a frenzy to name newly discovered stuff, many scientists
attached their own names to their discoveries. Dr. Corti named a glob in the ear that makes hearing possible the
organ of Corti. A scientist studying the pancreas found some unusual cells and named them after his family, thus
we have the Islets of Langerhans (remember, these are in the pancreas not the Caribbean). Had ol' Cas decided to
tack his name onto his discovery, we'd have water-soluble Funks and fat-soluble Funks. Because of his Polack humility
we've been spared Funk A, Funk B6, Funk C or Funk E. Another topic studied in nutrition along with vitamins is
minerals. If the namer of vitamins had used his name and the namer of minerals was Wagnal, nutrition students would
study Funks and Wagnals.
Fickle individualists they are, scientists nowadays use a combination
of the alphabet system and Greek or Latin names and for no apparent reason. Ask a nutritional scientist or biochemist
to give you the name of vitamin B1 and they'll look at you like you like you're drooling sewer foam. Thiamin is
now the accepted name for B1; B2 is riboflavin and B3 is niacin. Vitamin B6 is amazingly, vitamin B6 and vitamin
B12 is most often called vitamin B12. The incongruity has nothing to do with complex names; B6 is pyridoxine and
B12 is cobalamin. A name couldn't be much simpler than retinol but it's most often called vitamin A. Admittedly,
cholecalciferol (vitamin D) and alpha-tocopherol (vitamin E) are a little long winded but are they really that
bad? Phylloquinone is a bit much so vitamin K definitely works better here. Ascorbic acid (vitamin C) is on the
fence. Professionals trying to sound scholarly and sophisticated tend to use ascorbic acid while most lay folks
refer to it as vitamin C.