Tadeus Reichstein found the cheap way to make vitamin C

Person: Tadeus Reichstein
Lived: 1897–1996
Field: Chemistry, endocrinology
From: Polish-born Swiss

The story

Tadeus Reichstein was born in 1897 in Włocławek, in Russian-ruled Poland, the eldest of five sons of Jewish parents. After the pogroms of 1905, which he witnessed as a child in Kiev, his family fled antisemitic violence and settled in Switzerland. He became a Swiss citizen in 1914 and studied chemistry at the ETH in Zurich.

In the early 1930s Reichstein turned to vitamin C, the substance that prevents scurvy. It had only recently been isolated, and laboratories in several countries were racing to make it artificially. In 1933 he succeeded, independently of Norman Haworth’s group in Britain. The hard part was obtaining L-sorbose, a sugar needed as a starting material that could not be bought. Reichstein set out glasses containing sorbitol, yeast and a little vinegar. In some of them pure L-sorbose crystals appeared, in one case growing on the leg of a dead fruit fly that had carried in the right bacteria. Those bacteria, later named Acetobacter suboxydans, became the biological step in a route that then continued with ordinary chemistry.

Mixing a microbial step with chemical synthesis was far ahead of its time, and his biographers credit it with introducing patterns that became standard in modern biotechnology. Reichstein and the Swiss food company Haco, which had funded him, held the patent and made it available to Hoffmann-La Roche. The company was at first wary of relying on bacteria, but the method worked. The Reichstein process became the principal industrial method of producing vitamin C and still bears his name; many thousands of tons of vitamin C are produced each year by methods descended from it.

The result is a vital nutrient that costs almost nothing. Synthetic vitamin C goes into supplements, fortified foods and drinks, medicines and animal feed, and is used to keep foods fresh. Reichstein went on to share the 1950 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work on adrenal hormones, and he lived to the age of 99.

Why it matters

Reichstein’s process made vitamin C cheap enough to add to foods, medicines and supplements everywhere, so scurvy can be prevented for almost anyone.

About Tadeus Reichstein

Polish-Jewish refugee chemist in Switzerland who found the cheap way to make vitamin C, still named after him, and helped isolate cortisone, a mainstay against inflammation. Nobel Prize 1950.

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Tadeus Reichstein

1897–1996 · Chemistry, endocrinology

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