 McCollum opposed Casimir Funk's 1912 name "vitamines" (from "vital amines").They thought the prefix "vita" gave the substance too much importance, and that the ending "amine" means something specific in organic chemistry, but they only had scant evidence of one amino group.McCollum and Kennedy write in 1916 in the "Journal of Biological Chemistry" in their paper "The Dietary Factors Operating in the Production of Polyneuritis" (summarizing what proved to be their incomplete understanding of the time)