Word: bran
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Doctors announced the arrival of vitamin B-6 (pyridoxine), a new member of the prolific B family of vitamins, back in 1934. But like anxious parents of a balky child, they scarcely knew what to do with it. They found B-6 in such various substances as rice bran, liver, yeast, egg yolks and cereals. They even learned how to manufacture it themselves. Working with lab animals, they came to suspect that it might be a control factor in such diseases as hardening of the arteries and even cancer. But nobody found much use for it except as an antidote...
...bolted language; meal and bran together...
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...
...Williams, the victory marks a climax in a 40-year war against beriberi which he began, as it happened, in the Philippines. At 24, an unknown research chemist in Manila's Bureau of Science, Williams noted that chronic beriberi was dramatically cured by an extract made from rice bran. That was in 1910. It gave Williams the germ of an idea which flowered, 25 years later, in his isolating vitamin BI and then synthesizing it cheaply...
...simplest diseases to prevent and cure. It is caused by a vitamin (mainly BI) deficiency and can be stopped by putting enough BI in the diet.-There is plenty of BI in the outer coating of the rice grain and its seed germ, but both are removed as bran in the milling. Nearly all of the world's billion rice-eaters mill and polish their grain. They eat vitamin-poor white rice, and feed the vitamin-rich bran to their chickens...