Word: vitamins
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...with him an air mattress, a camp stool and two Syrian snakes "for company," Rudolph entered one side of the bottle. Then arc welders sealed him in, leaving only an 8-in. bottleneck open at the top. For the next year, Rudolph plans to live in bottled luxury on vitamin pills and write his memoirs. And if no one comes to see him? Well, he can always go back to the old grind-nailing his tongue to a board...
...Bitter almonds had a legendary reputation in the Middle Ages, but Sir Thomas (Religio Medici) Browne, checking up in the 17;th century, sadly reported: "That antidote against ebriety . . . hath commonly failed." Later came raw eels, thoughtfully suffocated in wine. Present-day self-treatments include yeast, yoghurt, lime juice, vitamin B1, cabbage water or diminishing doses of alcohol...
...Sieve calls his pills phosphorylated hesperidin. Plain hesperidin, known for years, is related to so-called vitamin P. These preparations have been tried with indifferent results in a variety of ailments, from kidney disorders and psoriasis to radiation sickness. Hesperidin comes from orange peel and could be made about as cheaply as aspirin in mass production...
...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...
Sulfas. By the time the vitamin frontier was thickly settled, another frontier was being opened. In 1935 the French broke the secret of a new German drug and published it: a simple substance derived from coal tar would kill the streptococcus germs that often caused fatal infections. The drug was Prontosil; from it came sulfanilamide, first of the modern "wonder drugs" and first of a long line of sulfas. Other companies were the first to find high-powered, patentable variants like sulfamerazine, sulfadiazine, sulfathiazole and sulfaguanidine. Merck chemists got what looked like a dud: sul-faquinoxaline. Never proved safe...