Commercial Vitamins

Business, which is rapidly teaching scientists to make fortunes, has lately tried to attract two university chemists who have patented processes of adding vitamins to foods. Dr. Harry Steenboch at the University of Wisconsin invented a way of irradiating foodstuffs with ultraviolet light. Such irradiated foods prevent rickets. When food professors offered him thousands for the use of his patents he organized the Wisconsin Research Foundation, put University of Wisconsin alumni in charge, let the royalties pay for further research.

Last week, Business was more successful. Dr. Joseph Keats Marcus, onetime assistant professor of Chemistry at Columbia University, now an employe of Pitman-Moore Co., Indianapolis pharmaceutical manufacturers, has a process of quickly and efficiently extracting from cod livers the vitamins which promote growth and bone formations. Food manufacturers have bid for licenses to the Marcus process. To exploit that demand, shrewd businessmen last week organized for Dr. Marcus and themselves an International Vitamin Corp., with 200,000 no-par shares.