B1

In a steaming bamboo hut near Manila, a lean, bronzed young U. S. chemist sat with a small native child on his knees. The child lay rigid, its face, arms and legs swollen, the rest of its body wasted. The child whimpered at the burning pain in his heart and intestines. He was dying of beriberi, ancient Oriental disease. The chemist thrust a few drops of an extract from rice hulls between the child's lips. Almost instantly the boy revived, and young Chemist Robert Runnels Williams, India-born son of U. S. missionaries, knew that he had saved a life by means of a strange, almost unheard-of ingredient of food, a substance which in its impure state came to be called vitamin B (for beri-beri). At once he decided what course he would follow in the years ahead.

Now, 28 years later, Dr. (Sc. D.) Williams, chemical director of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, has succeeded in synthesizing the curative substance, which is now called vitamin B2.* Upon advice of the American Medical Association, he re-named the vitamin thiamin because it contains sulfur (Greek theion). The American Chemical Society this spring awarded Dr. Williams its Willard Gibbs (highest) Medal. Science has just published a detailed article by him. "The Chemistry and Biological Significance of Thiamin." And next week Macmillan's will publish Vitamin B1 and its Use in Medicine ($5), which he wrote with Dr. Tom Douglas Spies of Cincinnati, a medical vitamin specialist. Dr. Williams, still zealous at 52, says: "The study of vitamins] may some day be regarded as rivaling in importance the discovery of micro-organisms as causative factors in disease. . . . It would be misleading to suppose that thiamin is the only vitamin which possesses a universal or nearly universal function in living cells. . . . [But] the lack of no other accessory substance leads to so early, so profound and so universal disaster."

The movements of a pigeon deprived of thiamin "consist in turning cart wheels and aimless floppings as if freshly decapitated." A human being, similarly starved of this nutritional necessity, may die of sudden heart failure. Less spectacular effects of B2 deficiency are, according to investigators, degeneration of the nervous system, enlargement of the heart, atrophy of muscles, loss of appetite, atony of the colon, stomach ulcers, loss of weight, failure to grow.

In nature thiamin appears abundantly in egg yolks, lean pork, crude molasses, peas and peanuts. It is found most abundantly in the germs of ripe grain. Millers discard such "hearts of wheat" to make white flour, causing Dr. Williams to cry: "Man commits a crime against nature when he eats the starch from the seed and throws away the mechanism necessary for the metabolism of that starch."

*The "vitamin B complex" contains at least 15 different entities, including B1 (prevents beri-beri); Bu (called riboflavin, prevents cataracts) ; nicotinic acid (prevents pellagra); a factor which prevents grey hair.

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