Elmer McCollum

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Elmer McCollum worked at odd jobs to finish high school and college, graduating from the University of Kansas in 1903 and earning his doctorate at Yale University in 1906. As a faculty member in agricultural chemistry at the University of Wisconsin, he established the nation's first colony of white lab rats to use for his nutrition experiments.

He isolated the growth-promoting factors now called vitamins A and B, distinguishing fat-soluble and water-soluble forms, and later showed that B is not a single compound, but a complex. McCollum and biochemist-in-training Marguerite Davis gave the "factors" letter names, because their structures had not yet been determined to give them proper chemical names.

McCollum opposed Casimir Funk's 1912 name vitamins because he thought they were no more "vital" than other nutrients and because they are not true amines. The name was changed to its current spelling in 1920.

Johns Hopkins University recruited McCollum in 1917 as professor of biochemistry, although he almost didn't get the job. At 6 feet and just 127 pounds, the nutritionist looked "frail" to the faculty members who interviewed him.

He published 150 papers at Johns Hopkins, reporting research work on tooth decay, vitamins D and E, and the role of trace minerals in nutrition, including aluminum, calcium, cobalt, fluorine, phosphorus, potassium, manganese, sodium, strontium and zinc. McCollum worked with Herbert Hoover's U.S. Food Administration to alleviate starvation in Europe in the aftermath of World War I. His classic textbook The Newer Knowledge of Nutrition went through multiple editions.

After his 1946 retirement, he wrote The History of Nutrition and an autobiography. McCollum received many awards, honors and medals in his life and died in 1967 rich in rewards. His home in Baltimore is a National Historic Landmark, and the American Society for Nutrition sponsors a McCollum lecture and gives the E.V. McCollum Award each year to "a clinical investigator who is perceived currently as a major creative force, actively generating new concepts in nutrition."

McCollum was a fierce believer in nutrition through food: To his dying day, he regarded drugstore vitamin pills and supplements as snake-oil quackery.