CHEMICAL TRIUMPHS.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 5 July 1924, Page 7

CHEMICAL TRIUMPHS.

FfitSl VITAMIN ISOLATION. ifie most _ dramatic moment of the ■se.ss;qu oi the American' Che mien l «ociecy at Washington in Amii came when Professor \\ alter H. Ecfdy, of the leacht-rs College, Columbia, took iiom ins pocket a .small yiai .and passed ii iiioniid among the assembled chemises. Aii they could see was a little* white powder at the bottom or a bottie, which might have .been sait or sugar as iai as ihey could see. Yet it created a sensation, shite it was the first vitamin that anyone had ever seen and handled. l'or many years biolcgisa-J chemists have been in pursuit of'”the elusive substances which were known to exist in certain foods, and vet could not be extracted and' identified, because they were so small in amount, so mixed up with the < unp/ex constituents of food, and so easily decomposed by chemical process of’purification. Five or more of these vitamins have been shown to exist bv the fact that when white rats are ’ fed with foods from which someone of them is absent the animals do not thrive. They, may stop growing or fall in with vairious maladies, or fail to reproduce. A French chemist named Wildier, in 1900, found that yeast contained a substance, which, in extremely small quantity would greatly -increase the growth cf the yeast plant. He named it “biofj,” 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 till now, when Professor Eddy has obtained it in clean crystalline form, ft is sufficiently pure to have a definite melting point, 223 degrees centigrade, and can be analysed. It is found to contain five atoms of nitrogen, and three atoms of oxygen in the molecule. Professor Eddy, when questioned as to its chemical structure, declined to coibmit himself positively at present, btu said that it might’ be regarded as “a reduced pyridine ring.” The same product can he extracted front alfalfa. Bios has remarkable potency as a siimulant to growth. An amount no more than three hundredths of a milligram, which is about as much of the powder as con Id be c-aught on the point of a pin given every day to a young rat stunted by living oil a. deficient diet wil cause it to grow again at a normal rate.