Word: riboflavin
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...muscles throbbing with pain. Also questionable is the indiscriminate use of such words as "safe," "without risk" and "harmless." Broad casters also often resort to pseudo-pharmaceutical names or impressive "scientific" terms that the average viewer may not understand ("If you're tired from lack of thiamin and riboflavin . . ."). Others relate doctors and celebrities to a product by innuendo...
Suddenly the chemical woods were full of vitamins: vitamin A for healthy eyes; riboflavin (B2) and nicotinic acid (niacin) to prevent pellagra; ascorbic acid (vitamin C) to prevent scurvy. Merck produced all these and many more. In no time, U.S. drugstores were selling vitamins in all doses and combinations. The Government encouraged the makers of processed foods, from which vitamins have been taken out, to enrich them by putting the vitamins back. Merck now supplies tons of vitamins a year to enrich the nation's impoverished bread, margarine and breakfast cereals...
...firefly's strange cold, yellow-green light. Not much is known about its complex chemistry but Dr. Strehler points out an extraordinary fact. The light that comes from luciferin has been analyzed spectroscopically and turns out to be very similar to the fluorescent glow given off by riboflavin (vitamin B2) when it is irradiated with invisible ultraviolet...
...Riboflavin, in turn, is believed to be vitally mixed up with the absorption of light by both plants and animals. It is present in the retinas of human and animal eyes and often in parts of growing plants that turn toward light. Luciferin may bear a relationship to the generation of light similar to the relationship that riboflavin bears to the absorption of light. If this is proved to be true, biochemistry will have made a long step toward understanding life itself, since life's basic energy comes from light...
...double jobs. One, fed in a certain way, yields oxalic acid, basic chemical of the blueprint industry; on a different diet it produces the gluconic acid used in medicines. The versatile Clostridium acetobutylicum, on a single diet of corn mash, produces acetone for solvents, butanol for automobile lacquers, and riboflavin (Vitamin...