- What did nutritional science in 1906 believe food was composed of, before Hopkins's experiments?
- What happened to rats fed a diet of only chemically pure macronutrients?
- What restored the sickened rats to health in Hopkins's experiments?
- What diseases were later understood to result from a lack of the accessory food factors Hopkins identified?
Vitamins and Nutrition Science
Essential nutrients and the science of diet and deficiency.
- How did Elmer McCollum determine that cod liver oil cured rickets through a compound distinct from vitamin A?
- Why did rickets flourish especially in the smoky, sun-deprived cities of the nineteenth century?
- What is the connection between sunlight exposure on skin and vitamin D production?
- Why did public health authorities begin fortifying milk with vitamin D in the 1930s?
- What did later researchers determine was actually causing the stomach lesions Fibiger studied in his rats?
- What structural connection did Windaus establish between sterols and the fat-soluble vitamins?
- How does ultraviolet light convert ergosterol into vitamin D?
- Why did children who never saw the sun develop rickets, and how did Windaus's work explain it?
- How did feeding chickens polished versus unpolished rice reveal the cause of beriberi?
- What was the leading theory about beriberi before Eijkman's chicken experiments, and why was it wrong?
- What did Frederick Hopkins's rat feeding experiments show about 'accessory food factors'?
- How did this work invert centuries of medical thinking about the causes of illness?
- What later syntheses, like vitamin B12 or penicillin, followed the same identify-then-build logic as Fischer's haemin work?
- How did feeding raw liver to anaemic dogs lead Whipple to a therapy for pernicious anaemia?
- What deficiency was eventually identified as the true cause of pernicious anaemia?
- Why do patients with pernicious anaemia fail to absorb vitamin B12 from ordinary food?
- How is pernicious anaemia treated today compared to the liver-heavy diets of the 1920s?
- How did Haworth determine the ring structure of vitamin C and name it ascorbic acid?
- What did Karrer discover about the relationship between beta-carotene and vitamin A?
- Why did the 1937 Chemistry committee choose to split the prize between two scientists?
- How much synthetic vitamin C is produced today as a result of this structural work?
- Why did Szent-Györgyi first call vitamin C 'hexuronic acid' before its identity was confirmed?
- Why were Hungarian red peppers so useful for isolating vitamin C in large quantities?
- How did the molecular understanding of vitamin C finally explain the cause of scurvy?
- How are carotenoid pigments in foods like carrots and egg yolks chemically related to vitamins A, B2, and B6?
- What role do vitamins B2 and B6 play in vision and nerve function according to Kuhn's research?
- How was folic acid first extracted and identified from spinach leaves?
- Why does a lack of folic acid cause red blood cells to grow abnormally large?
- What is the connection between folic acid and neural tube defects like spina bifida?
- How did public health agencies use the discovery of folic acid to prevent birth defects?
- What symptom appeared in Henrik Dam's chicks when he fed them a fat-free diet, and how did it lead him to discover vitamin K?
- Why is vitamin K named for the word 'Koagulation' rather than following the usual alphabetical sequence of vitamin names?
- How did Edward Doisy determine the chemical structure of vitamin K after Dam identified its existence?
- Why is vitamin K given routinely to newborns, and how does the anticoagulant warfarin exploit the same clotting pathway?
- What did Vincent du Vigneaud's research on biotin and penicillin contribute to medicine?
- What was Boyd Orr's central argument about the true cause of world hunger?
- How did Boyd Orr connect malnutrition to geopolitical instability?
- What role did Boyd Orr play in founding the Food and Agriculture Organization, and why did he resign from it?
- Why did solving the structure of vitamin B12 take Hodgkin eight years and early computing assistance?
- Which complex natural molecules did Woodward succeed in synthesizing over his career, and why was each considered difficult?
- What are the Woodward-Hoffmann rules, and how did the vitamin B12 collaboration with Roald Hoffmann produce them?
- What is retinal, and why does a vitamin A deficiency lead to night blindness?
- What did Nakamatsu believe was the connection between his diet and his inventive productivity?
- What did researchers find about dung beetles' preferences among different animal droppings?
- How does the energy yield of a human body compare to a mammoth or a horse?
- What are the competing explanations for why pizza consumption correlated with lower cancer risk?
- What public health problem is this electric taste technology meant to address?
- What correlation did Newman find between claimed supercentenarian prevalence and the quality of local birth registration?
- How does this finding affect confidence in the famous longevity claims associated with places like Sardinia and Okinawa?
- How did the researchers propose using PTFE's inertness to add dietary bulk without adding calories?
- How did Mennella and Beauchamp determine that flavour compounds from a mother's diet reach breast milk?