Word: b1
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Vitamins. In 1934, Merck's head of research, Dr. Randolph Major, got a call from Biochemist Robert Runnells Williams. Said Williams: "I've isolated a minute quantity of B1." Would Merck be interested in supplying him with more of the natural substance, helping to establish its molecular structure, and maybe trying to synthesize...
Major was interested. For more than a year, tons of rice bran poured into one end of the Merck plant in Rahway and fractions of an ounce of B1 trickled out at the other end. Williams and the Merck-men tackled the job of synthesis, and in 1936 succeeded in making B1 easily and cheaply from simple organic compounds. Merck went into big-scale production. Result: medicine at last had a weapon to vanquish beriberi...
...B1, the anti-beriberi factor (TIME, April 30), B2, which cures pellagra, and C, which prevents scurvy. At Johns Hopkins in 1922, Dr. McCollum added D, for sturdy bones, to the list...
...Average Man." No man was better equipped than Roger Williams to show what vitamins could do. The younger (58) brother of Robert Runnels Williams of B1 and beriberi fame (TIME, April 30), he identified pantothenic acid and helped to discover folic acid, two of the vitamins in the B complex, did pioneering work on several of the others. Along the way, Roger Williams became distressed by the way science tends to deal with the nonexistent "average man," plumped for a science of "humanics" in which differences among men, rather than similarities, would be emphasized...
...people to stop milling their rice. In some areas, to eat white rice is a point of pride, even among poor peasants. Still more compelling, natural or brown rice spoils so fast that it cannot be stored until the next harvest. Dr. Williams had assigned the moneymaking patents on B1 to the Williams-Waterman Fund; after V-J day the fund set out to put the vitamins back in the Asian's rice...