Vitamin A - History

History

The discovery of vitamin A may have stemmed from research dating back to 1906, indicating that factors other than carbohydrates, proteins, and fats were necessary to keep cattle healthy. By 1917 one of these substances was independently discovered by Elmer McCollum at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Lafayette Mendel and Thomas Burr Osborne at Yale University. Since "water-soluble factor B" (vitamin B) had recently been discovered, the researchers chose the name "fat-soluble factor A" (vitamin A). In 1919, Steenbock (University of Wisconsin) proposed a relationship between yellow plant pigments (beta-carotene) and vitamin A. Vitamin A was first synthesized in 1947 by two Dutch chemists, David Adriaan van Dorp and Jozef Ferdinand Arens.

Read more about this topic:  Vitamin A

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    When the history of guilt is written, parents who refuse their children money will be right up there in the Top Ten.
    Erma Brombeck (20th century)

    A people without history
    Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
    Of timeless moments.
    —T.S. (Thomas Stearns)

    The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.
    Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)