CHEMICAL TRIUMPH.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXV, Issue 4728, 23 July 1924, Page 3

CHEMICAL TRIUMPH.

FIRST VITAMINE ISOLATION. AFTER YEARS OF FAILURE. The most dramatic moment of the session of the American Chemical Society atj Washington in April came when Professor Walter H. Eddy, of the Teachers’ College, Columbia, took from .’is pocket a small vial and parsed it around among the assembled chemnts. All they could see was a little white powder at the bottom of a bottle which might have been salt or sugar, so far as they could see. Yet it created a sensation, since it was the first vitamine that anyone bad ever seen and handled. For many years biological chemists have been in pursuit of the elusive substances which were known to exist in certain foods, and yet could not be extracted and identified, because .thej were small in amount, so mixed up with the complex constituents of the food, and so easily decomposed by chemical process of purification' Five or more of these vitamines have been shown to exist by the fact that when white rats are fed with foods fiom which some one of them is absent the animals dp not thrive. They may stop growing, or fall ill with various maladies, or fail to reproduce. A French chemist named Wildicr, in 1900, found that yeast contained a substance which, in extremely small quantity, would greatly increase the growth of the yeast plant. He named it "bios,” but was not able to isolate it. Since then many chemists have been on its track, but none could get it out in a pure state until now, when Professor Eddy has obtained it in clear crystallne form. It is sufficiently pure to have a definite melting point, 223 degrees centigrade, and can be analysed. It is found to contain five atoms of carbon, 11 atoms of hydrogen, one atom of nitrogen, and three atoms of oxygen in the molecule. Professor Eddy, when questioned as to its chemical structure, declined to commit himself positively at present, but said that it might be regarded as "a reduced pyridine ring.”

The same produce can be extracted from alfalfa. Bios has remarkable potency as a stimulant to growth. An amount no more than three hundredths of a milligram, which is about as much of the powder as could be cangii* on the point of. a pin, given every day to a young rat stunted by living, on a deficient diet, will cause it to grow again at a normal rate.