Stored Vitamin

The King of Norway listened intently, likewise the Crown Prince and members of the Norwegian Academy of Science, to a report made fortnight ago by bright young Dr. Ottar Rygh. Dr. Rygh had learned how to store the mother stuff of Vitamin C, anti-scurvy. Because the process is important, U. S. nutritionists were impatient for his complete paper to reach this country. Significant quotations available last week: "It seems simple enough now. My task was to find a method by which Vitamin C could be produced in the laboratory in such form that it could be kept in storage without losing its power. Vitamin C is mainly to be found in fruit, vegetables or fresh milk from cows that have been grazing in the open. In my experiments I used the juice of oranges. ... In the unripe oranges I found the so-called provitamin --that is, the product which, when the fruit ripens, develops into the vitamin. I found that it was identical with what the chemists call narkotin. . . . Having arrived at this conclusion, my next task was to find a mechanical process to deal with narkotin, which proved to be very difficult to deal with, because it simply disappeared in storage.

"I got at the narkotin in the following way: the juice was pressed out of the unripe orange, and carefully evaporated under vacuum at a very low temperature. The juice after this treatment was pure. A solution of carbonate of soda was added and the juice again treated with ether, which then was again steamed off. The result was a yellow oil containing some needle-shaped crystals. When these crystals had been treated with ultra violet rays they proved able to withstand storage, and when they were given to a porpoise suffering from scurvy in its acutest form, the porpoise was completely cured after a short time."

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