Casimir Funk: The scientist who gave us the word ‘vitamin’
Biochemist Casimir Funk realised that certain compounds in our diet are essential for keeping us healthy – but he wasn’t the first to isolate a vitamin
By Alex Wilkins
23 February 2024
Casimir Funk in his laboratory in 1954
Associated Press/Alamy
Casimir Funk, the Polish biochemist who coined the term “vitamins” for the vital class of molecules that help keep us alive, is the subject of today’s Google doodle.
There have been theories of how food affects health for millennia. In ancient Greece and Rome, early physicians invented “humoral” theory, which stated that foods must have the right balance of wet, dry, hot and cold to keep the body’s four essential humours – fire, earth, blood and phlegm – in check. Much later, physicians made more distinct associations, such as the observation that consuming citrus fruits like lemons helped to prevent the disease scurvy in sailors on long voyages.
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In the late 19th century, scientists were trying to figure out the cause of beriberi disease, which can affect a person’s nervous or cardiovascular system and is today known as a vitamin B1 deficiency. In 1897, Christiaan Eijkman published a study based on experiments in chickens, proposing that diets containing brown rice were protective against beriberi, compared with those consisting of only white rice.
Casimir Funk read Eijkman’s paper and set himself the task of finding the chemical compound that gave brown rice its protective properties. In 1912, Funk managed to isolate a chemical that he thought was responsible and found it contained a characteristic nitrogen compound called an amine, so he named it a vital amine, or vitamine. When scientists eventually realised that vitamins didn’t necessarily need to contain an amine group, they dropped the final “e”.
Funk suggested that similar compounds might exist for many other “deficiency diseases”, as he called them, writing: “We will speak of a beriberi and scurvy vitamine, which means a substance preventing that special disease.” Funk also correctly suggested that vitamins existed that prevented the diseases pellagra and rickets.
