172 Vitamins in Human Nutrition
but it was not until 1926 that the Splittingup of the “B fam-
ily” really began. From that time until the present more
and more different offspring from old mother “B” have been
shaken loose from the enveloping folds of her skirts. The
discovery and identification of these “B” offspring has been
a very complicated detective story, to the solution of which
many scientists have contributed. Not all the “discoveries”
have maintained a place in the esteem of nutritionists, but a
number of them have stood the test of time.
Fourteen years after Funk had obtained his anti-beri-beri
extract from rice polishings and yeast, vitamin B1 was ob-
tained in pure form, though in very minute quantities, in the
same laboratory in Java where beri-beri was first shown to
be due to a deficiency in the diet. Later Dr. R. R. Williams,
of the Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York, improved
the technique so that larger amounts could be obtained for
study, but it still required about two and a half tons of rice
polishings to extract one ounce of the pure vitamin. After
twenty years of research, in the course of which the mole-
cules of the vitamin were chemically taken to pieces bit by
bit to find out what they were made of, and then pieced to-
gether again like the parts of a jigsaw puzzle, Dr. Williams
finally, in 1936, solved its chemical structure and succeeded
in making it synthetically. Now the pure crystalline sub-
stance can be obtained in any drugstore at a cent or two per
milligram, and 1 ½ to 2 milligrams per day is all an average
man requires. There would be no difficulty in carrying home
a year’s supply; the equivalent in weight of two aspirin tab-
lets would be more than enough.
The name “thiamin” has been approved for this pure
chemical substance. It is water-soluble, and differs from all
other vitamins, except the other members of the “B” family,
by containing nitrogen. It appears to be one of Nature’s