Word: b12
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...antibiotics industry has also produced spectacular ideas. Only a few years ago, Chas. Pfizer & Co. was dumping the residue of its streptomycin fermentation vats in the Wabash River. Then Pfizer and other antibiotics companies found that the residue contained vitamin B12, a powerful growth stimulant. Once, B-12 was extracted from animal livers for humans and sold for thousands of dollars an ounce. Now Pfizer sells the B-12-rich residue cheaply to feed companies, which put it into animal rations. Merck & Co. and others have synthesized gibberellic acid, which has a powerful growth-stimulating effect on plants. Minute traces...
...Long in the business of making fertilizer from sewage, the Milwaukee City Sewerage Commission got into a new line through a commercial subcontractor: extracting the growth-vital, anti-anemia vitamin B12 from the fertilizer...
...disease, but only as a symptom of some other disease. As a result, a whole class of so-called "primary anemias" is being dropped from medical thinking, e.g., pernicious anemia is now known to be a metabolic upset in which the system fails to make proper use of vitamin B12. Once the cause of this or practically any other anemia is tracked down, the underlying complaint can be treated and the symptom usually disappears...
...whole field of vitamins, Merck's greatest triumph, by far, is its most recent. Its chemists extracted the elusive anti-anemia factor from liver in pure form: the ruby-colored crystals of vitamin B12, essential to growth and the most powerful medicinal substance known in nature. One thirty-millionth of an ounce a day is enough for a healthy man's blood-making factory; one three-millionth checks pernicious anemia...