The Indianapolis times. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]) 1922-1965, 1933-11-11
-DietZ on Science
KNOWLEDGE OF
NUTRITION HAS
THREE PARENTS
Chemistry, Physiology and
Medicine Give World
New Science.
BY DAVID DIETZ
Scripps-Howard Science Editor

ScrtppS- HOWARD science EultOr
From one point of view, a human
being is an engine. He takes in
fuel, burns it up. and produces en-
ergy But the human engine is a
very involved one. 1t is not as SIM
pie as a steam engine and its fuel
is much more complicated than a
coal pile
An understanding of what is in
the fuel used by the human engine
and how it is utilized has come only
with the growth of a very special
lied branch of chemistry, the chem
istry of nutrition. 1t is a branch of
science in which chemistry, physi-
ology and medicine join hands, and
it promises much for the future.
How this science of the chemistry
of nutrition has grown was described
at a recent meeting of the Ameri-
can Chemical Society by Professor
H. G. Sherman of Columbia uni.
versity.
A century ago, he tells us, chem
istry had accumulated a number of
| discoveries which we now recognize
as fundamental to the science of
nutrition, but little of what we could
now consider an actual science of
nutrition yet existed.
Two Made Beginning
Lavoisier. the great French chem
ist who lost his head in the revolu-
ton, had demonstrated the funda-
mental resemblance of the oxida-
ton of foodStuffs in the body to the
oxidation or burning of them in the
air. Wohler had just made a be-
ginning Of bridging the gap between
organic and inorganic substances by
making the first laboratory manu-
facture or synthesis of an organic
substance, namely, urea.
Professor Sherman dates the be-
ginning of the science of nutrition
from the publication of Liebig's book
in 1910 upon the significance of
chemistry for agriculture and physi-
ology.
Another pioneer in the field of nu-
triton was the great Pasteur.
While the name of Pasteur is
more intimately identified with fer
mentation and infection that with
nutrition in the ordinary sense"
Professor Sherman says, yet Pas
teur, in addition to being the chem
list who became the father of mod
ern bacteriology, also was the one
who, perhaps more than any other,
made clear and convincing the far
reaching principle that life pro-.
cesses are amenable to successful in
veStigation by chemical methods and
from the chemical point of view"
yale Gave Leadership
From the American viewpoint"
Professor Sherman continues, ct is
of interest to note that before the
end of the COS there was a strong
center Of advanced teaching and re-
search in physiological chemistry at
Yale. Food chemistry was well de-
veloped in several of our colleges
and universities
Every state had in its agricultural
experiment station a center of re-
search in agricultural chemistry
which in many cases was beginning
to include consideration of the nu-
triton both of plans and of farm
| animals, and the United States de-
partment of agriculture was con-
Quoting research in the nutrition of
man under the direction of Profess
Sor Atwater.
Professor Sherman also calls at
tention to the fact that Eijkman
had recorded what we now know
to be good experimental evidence
Of the existence of a nutritional de-
flciency disease.
Unfortunately. however, as a COM
mittee of the British medical re-
search council afterward phrased it.
he had presented his findings with
so strong a pharmacological bias"
as to obscure their nutritional sig
niflcance. This was great pity.
for as a result the significance from
nutritional viewpoint was not rec
ognized until the twentieth century.