Vitamins

To knowledge of the five vitaminic ingredients of foods, which make life liveable. Dr. Herbert McLean Evans of the University of California last week joined news of a sixth.

The five previously known are: Vitamin A, which stimulates body growth; Vitamin B, which prevents neuritis (beriberi is the characteristic disease when Vitamin B is lacking); Vitamin C, which prevents scurvy (see below); Vitamin D, which prevents rickets; and Vitamin E, which must be present if an animal is to be fertile.

To young rats Dr. Evans, head of the University of California's department of anatomy, fed all five vitamins with nourishing, highly purified casein and recrystallized cane sugar. The rats remained half grown and sexually immature. Previous experiments had shown that rats given food that contained the five vitamins thrived normally. Clearly, Dr. Evans' diet lacked some element present but not recognized in the foods of foregoing vitamin experiments.

Fresh lettuce was added to the rats' meals. The animals swiftly waxed mature in all respects. Dr. Evans fed others liver with the basic regimen. Liver, too, effectively matured them. Dr. Evans and his aides decided that both liver and lettuce contained some element the lack of which prevented physical maturity. They reduced that common element of lettuce and liver to a form that was relatively pure as a physical preparation but intricately complex as a chemical compound. They named it Vitamin F and guarded well their research. Immediately upon the public announcement last week, Dr. Evans took train for Manhattan, and a long awaited trip to Europe.

Back & forth across the paved courtyard of Manhattan's Bellevue Hospital, Arctic Explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, rugged as a caribou, strode last week with ten meat-eating companions. On nothing but fresh killed meat did they subsist during the week, and nothing other than fresh meat were they to eat for fourteen days. If at the end of a fortnight, none had scurvy, if in no case were legs and thighs splotched with extravasated blood, if no gums swelled spongily, if mucous membranes oozed no blood (scorbutic symptoms), then Explorer Stefansson would have proved--better than biologists could have proved in experiments with rats--that meat, at least freshly killed meat, contains Vitamin C and prevents scurvy, scourge of seafarers and Arctic explorers.