Casimir Funk was a Polish biochemist who coined the term "vitamins" for the vital compounds that help keep us alive. He is the subject of today's Google doodle. Funk's work built upon earlier theories of how food affects health, including the ancient Greek and Roman "humoral" theory and the observation that consuming citrus fruits like lemons helped prevent scurvy in sailors.
Funk's research focused on the cause of beriberi disease, which can affect a person's nervous or cardiovascular system and is today known as a vitamin B1 deficiency. He read a study by Christiaan Eijkman, which proposed that diets containing brown rice were protective against beriberi, compared with those consisting of only white rice. Funk 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. The compound that Funk isolated and dubbed an "anti beriberi factor" was what we now call vitamin B3, or niacin, which doesn't actually prevent beriberi. However, his work laid the foundation for the discovery of the rest of the vitamins, which number 13 in total, including eight kinds of vitamin B and vitamins A, C, D, E and K.
