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Vitamin C or Acid Ascorbic |
ENCYCLOPAEDIA |
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When the soldiers of Louis Saint died in crusade, it was often of a strange disease of which the lord de Joinville gives terrifying descriptions, specifying that the flesh rotted of Cross were detached in scraps.
The evil known since highest Antiquity, since the papyrus Ebers, the oldest medical document, was already described by it the symptoms.
One also mentions it in the Old Will, in the writings of Hippocrates and Pline the Old one.
DISCOVERED
This dramatic disease, characterized by hemorrhages under the skin, in bone tissues and the articulations, by an ignition of the gums which ends in the progressive fall of the teeth, by violent articular pains, anemia, a great tiredness and, in the children, by disorders of ossification, it is the scurvy, which one knew later than it was due to the deficiency in vitamin C.
In the absence of treatment, death occurs following internal bleedings and of super infections, because of the least resistance of the organization to the infection.
In 15th and 16th centuries, the large navigators who traversed the seas and explored the continents paid him a heavy tribute.
The Lescarbot chronicler tells as follows: during a voyage of Jacques Cartier towards Canada, "on 110 men who we were, there were not 10 of healthy of them...
At the time of a second voyage, with New Ground, in 1535, Jacques Cartier saved a part of his crew of the frightening disease while making him absorb a decoction recommended by the Indians.
Later, the tree of life of which the sheets had been used to prepare the decoction will be identified; it was the white cedar, of which 100 G of foliage contain 45 Mg of ascorbic acid (vitamin C).
In 1593, the English captain James Lancaster had the brilliant intuition to make drink with his sailors some lemon juice drops: the men escaped from the scurvy.
But they were there isolated experiments which remained circumscribed and ignored. The media did not exist yet!
And Dr. James Lind, doctor of the English navy at the hospital of Portsmouth, will be able to say to the 18th century that the plague killed more English sailors than all the battles with the French and the Spaniards...
Proof is that in 1740 and 1741, at the time of the great forwarding of the admiral Anson around the world, his flagship Centurion lost 292 men, and Gloucester lost 300 of them. On 3 vessels, there remained hardly 70 valid men.
For a very long time, one suspected that the terrible evil came from food; but if some insulated intuitive showed well the lack of fruits and vegetables, it was generally the bad quality of food, the wet cold and even sadness and the trouble which one accused.
In the final analysis, it is Dr. James Lind who discovered the curative role of lemons and oranges and recommended employment in its Treaty of it on the scurvy published in 1753. It had carried out comparison tests on several groups of sailors, the ones consuming of citrus fruits, the others of sea water, the vinegar or the vitriol elixir! The first were saved; the history, modest, does not say what it occurred of the seconds.
The lemon juice addition to the ration of the sailors became obligatory by decree, which was worth the nickname of "limeys to them".
Little by little, the victims of the scurvy were done fewer, on sea as on ground, where (improvement of the transport of the fresh products contributed to the rarefaction of the evil in the cities. One however saw cases during the Crimean War and the head office of Paris, in 1870.
Empiricism had made it possible to find the remedy. But, if it were known how to avoid the scurvy, one was unaware of why the remedy acted. The vitamin C was still not known, and 1907 will have to be waited until to discover it.
The first experiments were made by Hobst and Frôlich, which nourished animals by completely depriving them of fresh plants, to check if they would sufIron from scurvy.
Their first experiments did not give any result: one will learn later than the rats and the pigeons on which they had done them have precisely the capacity to make the synthesis of the vitamin C, thus putting them at the shelter scurvy.
The following experiments, they, made on guinea-pigs, caused an experimental scurvy: indeed these animals, like the human being, cannot synthesize the vitamin C.
One establishes as well as the principle anti-scurvy was well in the fresh plants.
This principle, water soluble, was classified then by Funk among the vitamins, and was called, vitamin C by Drummond in 1907.
It is Szent Gyôrgyi which, in 1928, isolated the first, initially starting from the bark of the glands suprarenal, then lemon, a product which was called acid ascorbic in 1932, to point out its properties against the scurvy.
Its structure was developed by Hirst and its synthesis made in 1933 by Reichstein and Haworth, as many well forgotten and well ignored names general public, can be even of many scientists.
Today, the scurvy does not exist any more in the developed countries.
Even the infantile scurvy, described by Barlow since 1833, was definitively prevented by the orange juice addition in the food of the infants.
But the scurvy still makes victims in the Third World countries, in particular during the dry season, in Somalia, for example.
WHEN the FLIES INTERIronE THEMSELVES
The synthesis of the vitamin C by Reichstein was initially purely chemical.
To produce it in greater quantity, it was necessary to transform sorbitol into sorbose.
In order to hasten this transformation, Reichstein placed a container containing of the sorbitol with wine, sugar and vinegar on the window of its laboratory, then it left in weekend.
On its return, it found, at the bottom of the container, the crystals of sorbose: drosophilae (also called fruit flies), whose digestive system lodges bacteria suitable for transform the sorbitol into sorbose, had carried out the transformation.
The history does not stop there. Reichstein, eager to exploit its discovery, proposed to Dr. Barren, to director Laboratories Hoffmann the Rock, to buy to him its patent with the help of a sum of 50 000 Swiss Francs, payable only when the first vitamin C would leave the factories...
Haworth and Karrer, collaborators of the laboratory and big shots of research on the vitamins, appreciated little that a third finds before them a manufacturing process. And Dr. Barrell, when it accepted the proposal, thought that it would have never to pay the sum, the more so as at the time the Hoffmann Laboratories it - Rock were of small size, and in financial difficulty.
It is however this contract which opened the era of the vitamins and brought fortune to Hoffmann the Rock.
Today, more than 35.000 tons of vitamin C is produced each year in the world.
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Supplementary food
Vitamin A
