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Abstract

THE Nobel Prize for medicine for 1929 has been divided between Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins, professor of biochemistry in the University of Cambridge, and Dr. C. Eijkman, of Utrecht, for their discoveries in connexion with vitamins. Hopkins' work on vitamins is well known: so early as 1906 he realised that animals cannot flourish on pure protein, fat, carbohydrate, salts, and water, in this respect confirming work by Lumin, Stepp, and others. But the importance of these experiments lies in the fact that he emphasised the point that the failure to live might be due to the absence from the diet of certain unknown accessory food factors, since it occurred even although the animals were eating sufficient food of suitable composition to support growth, as was shown when a source of the accessory factors was added to the diet. These experiments were published in 1912, and from this date the real study of the influence of these factors, or vitamins as they are now called, in nutrition may be said to have commenced. Dietary diseases were not unknown at this period, but other explanations for the symptoms were accepted: the importance of Hopkins work lies in the new orientation which was given to the study of their causes: thus absence of a factor from the diet may result in failure to grow or other symptoms; previously the symptoms had been explained as due to some influence of the incomplete diet, the deleterious effects of which were neutralised by adding the missing substances.