Word: vitamins
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Elizabeth's Diary. The dead man was Sir Jack Drummond, 61, famed British biochemist, who had devised Britain's palate-poor but vitamin-rich World War II diet of cabbage salads, carrots, grey wheaten bread, potato pastry, and dried eggs. Scientific adviser to wartime Food Minister Lord Woolton he had developed an emergency meal for the bombed-out called blitz soup, and later a predigested food for starved survivors of Hitler's prison camps. A quiet, modest but convivial man, Sir Jack (he refused to be known by his correct Christian names: John Cecil) had once collaborated...
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...
...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...
...come from hydrogenation. They had the same problem when they produced chemicals from petroleum gases which had no known use, but which now sell in quantities totaling more than 2 billion Ibs. a year, and go into everything from an antifreeze (ethylene glycol) to cigarettes, aspirin, and synthetic Vitamin Blt More than a third of Carbide's earnings ($104 million in 1951) comes from products and processes that did not even exist in 1939. Among them: the process for making butadiene from alcohol which provided 90% of all U.S. World War II synthetic rubber; synthetic gems which outshine...
...disheartening features of the battle against the disease is that so many promising trails, seeming to lead toward a cure, suddenly come to a dead end. Two researchers in Boston (where the disease is inexplicably commoner than in most cities) thought they had the answer in unbalanced iron and vitamin rations given to prematures. In Baltimore, Drs. William and Ella Owens seemed to get good results in arresting the disease with a vitamin E preparation (TIME, Aug. 29, 1949), but other doctors could not duplicate their results. Some eyemen report