Casimir Funk discovered the idea of vitamins

Person: Casimir Funk
Lived: 1884–1967
Field: Biochemistry
From: Polish-American

The story

Casimir Funk was born in Warsaw in 1884 to a Jewish family; his father was a dermatologist. Although his parents hoped he would become a doctor, he chose chemistry, studying in Geneva and Bern and earning his doctorate at the University of Bern in 1904, at the age of twenty. He then worked at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, in Berlin and at a hospital in Wiesbaden before moving in 1910 to the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine in London.

There the institute's head, Charles Martin, gave him a puzzle to solve: beriberi, a disease of the nerves that causes pain and paralysis and was common where people ate mainly polished white rice. Earlier researchers had shown that diets could make animals ill. The Dutch physician Christiaan Eijkman had found that chickens sickened by polished rice recovered when fed the rice hulls, though he wrongly blamed a toxin in the rice, and Frederick Gowland Hopkins had suggested that foods contained unknown “accessory factors.”

Funk set out to find the protective substance itself. He fed pigeons on polished rice until they fell ill, then showed that an extract from rice polishings, or small amounts of yeast, restored their health. He concluded that the extract contained something the body needed in tiny amounts. Because he believed it contained an amine, a nitrogen compound, he called it a “vital amine,” or “vitamine.”

His landmark 1912 paper in the Journal of State Medicine went much further. He argued that there were at least four such substances, preventing beriberi, scurvy, pellagra and rickets, and that their absence from food caused disease. It was a major shift in scientific thinking, away from blaming such illnesses only on germs or toxins. The paper brought him public recognition and a Beit Fellowship from the University of London.

The final “e” was dropped in the 1920s, when it became clear that not all vitamins are amines, but Funk's word and his deficiency theory stuck. A 2013 review in the Australasian Medical Journal called him the godfather of the vitamin movement. He went on to publish more than 140 scientific papers, on hormones, diabetes, ulcers and the biochemistry of cancer as well as nutrition.

Why it matters

Funk's vitamin concept helped launch the science of nutrition, leading to fortified foods and supplements that have prevented deficiency diseases in millions of people.

About Casimir Funk

Warsaw-born biochemist of Jewish descent who coined the word ‘vitamine’ in 1912 and argued that beriberi, scurvy, pellagra and rickets were deficiency diseases.

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Casimir Funk

1884–1967 · Biochemistry

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