Word: funking
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...three most salient drug advances of the 20th century, vitamins, hormonal medicine and antibacterial "wonder" drugs, the first continues to lead the list in everyday importance. Last week Dr. Casimir Funk, the quiet biochemist whose research ranged through two of these fields and led him to the discovery of vitamins in 1911, died of cancer at 83 in Albany...
Born a dermatologist's son in Warsaw in 1884, Dr. Funk left Switzerland's Bern University in 1904 with a Ph.D. in chemistry and began his research at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, moving on to London's Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine in 1910. He pursued the causes of beriberi, the deficiency disease that attacks the nerves, heart and digestive system. Beriberi was particularly prevalent in those days among Eastern peoples whose diet consisted mainly of polished rice...
...Funk put test pigeons on a rice diet. First he fed them polished rice; then natural rice, with all its bran coating. When the pigeons got the coating they thrived; when they did not they suffered from polyneuritis. Obviously, the bran-fed pigeons were getting a nutrient that the others were not. Funk concentrated the nutrient, now known as vitamin...
Preventing Disease. From this discovery, Funk correctly theorized that chemical substances which he named vitamines (from the Latin vita for life and amine for chemical compounds containing nitrogen) were capable of preventing deficiency diseases such as scurvy, pellagra and rickets, and indeed were essential to the sustenance of healthy life. The assumption that all vitamins contain nitrogen later proved wrong, and the e was dropped...
...occupations. Many go into teaching-though if the Catholic seminaries that they attended are unaccredited, which is often the case, they must return to college to earn a teacher's certificate. Others enter social work. One ex-priest, only four weeks after quitting, got a job at Funk & Wagnalls Publishing Co. in Manhattan. "I was completely honest on my job application," he says. "I just put down that I was a laicized priest, and that sent them to their dictionary." Still others end up in less likely pursuits. A California cleric has become a chiropractor. One Biblical scholar...