During the wartime food shortage, researchers noticed a curious thing about the health of chickens. Well-housed chickens, deprived of animal-protein foods, began to droop and look sickly. Chickens living in dirty, littered henhouses did all right, even on a poor diet; but when the henhouse litter was cleaned up, they began to droop too. This was especially interesting to six Lederle Laboratories researchers who guessed that something in the chicken litter was supplying some mysterious factor the chickens needed.
What was it? The researchers isolated one microorganism after another; they cultured each and...
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