Word: vitamins
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Under austerity and Socialism, Britons have been getting their pep and stamina less & less from good old-fashioned beefsteak, more & more from vitamin pills. Last week it seemed as if even their vitamins were letting them down...
...four days, the oldsters streamed through the lobbies of Detroit's hotels, singing hymns and loyally downing vitamin pills. But despite the undaunted doctor, the delegates could not help feeling a little querulous. Detroit's Mayor Albert E. Cobo had pleaded that he was too busy to welcome them. By solemn resolution, the delegates found the excuse flimsy and the mayor's conduct "an outrageous insult." Politicians didn't do that sort of thing in the old days...
...This individual," says Williams, "probably constitutes the first case on record in which an alcoholic has become a moderate drinker." There were others among the few alcoholics treated with vitamins by the time Williams wrote his book. Since then, doctors at Boston's Peter Bent Brigham Hospital have tested the method with 85 alcoholics, giving some of them dummy capsules to rule out the psychological factor, and report at least one-third better results in the vitamin-treated cases...
...find out how rhodopsin works, Biologist Wald extracted a protein called opsin from the eyes of freshly killed animals and mixed it with vitamin A and two enzymes (organic catalysts): alcohol oxidase (from horse livers) and cozymase (from yeast). When this mixture is placed in the dark, the enzymes convert the vitamin A to retinene, a yellow pigment. Then the retinene combines with the opsin to form bright red rhodopsin...
When the mixture is exposed to light, even very faint light, all the chemical processes go into reverse. The rhodopsin divides into retinene and opsin. The retinene reverts to vitamin A. This is just what happens when light shines into a dark-adapted eye: the rhodopsin in the rods is suddenly decomposed...