At Johns Hopkins' School of Hygiene and Public Health, 150 U.S. vitamin experts got together last week. Sample swap talk: "Anybody buying vitamin E is probably a sucker, since no case of deficiency in an adult has been found . . . But it might be good for Rh babies, and those with diabetic mothers . . . Despite an abundance of sunshine and vitamin D, there is still a lot of rickets in Baltimore."
In the front row, listening intently, sat the guest of honor, Dr. Elmer Verner McCollum, 72. He has done more than any other man to put vitamins back in the nation's bread and milk, to put fruit on American breakfast tables, fresh vegetables and salad greens in the daily diet. Incidentally and unwittingly, he started a booming business: every year Americans spend $250 million for vitamins (four-fifths of it for pills and capsules). Much of this spending, Dr. McCollum believes, is foolish, because most people can get all the vitamins tney need from proper diet. Elmer McCollum was a farm boy, born (in a sod hut) near Fort Scott, Kans. As a young man, with a Ph.D. from Yale, he went to the University of Wisconsin to work on cattle feeds. But the experiments were being made on heifers, which are unhandy as laboratory animals. McCollum wanted to try out the feeds on rats. The legislature refused money to buy rats, so McCollum trapped some.
The word "vitamine" had just been coined, but nobody had yet found one. By stuffing his animals with various food extracts, McCollum identified the first one —"A"—in butter. This made him ace-high with Wisconsin dairy farmers—until he broadcast the fact that it could be added to margarine. The word vitamine had its last letter chopped off and the family grew apace. After vitamin A came
B1, the anti-beriberi factor (TIME, April 30), B2, which cures pellagra, and C, which prevents scurvy. At Johns Hopkins in 1922, Dr. McCollum added D, for sturdy bones, to the list.
Vitamins became big business, but Dr. McCollum has no share in it. His only income apart from a university professor's salary has been from research work for a dairy products firm.
Now officially retired, Dr. McCollum has started a new career, probing the secrets of the amino acids which the body makes by digesting proteins and then uses as building blocks. If they can be isolated from animal matter that is now usually thrown away (blood, bone, hair and feathers), they might be used to stretch the world's supply of protein foods by as much as 50%. There are 23 amino acids, and Dr. McCollum has succeeded in getting only one in pure crystalline form. It does not bother him that there are 22 to go. "I expect to be still around here, working, 30 years from now," he says.