American biochemist (1879–1967)
Elmer Verner McCollum (March 3, 1879 – November 15, 1967) was an American biochemist known for his work on the influence of diet on health. McCollum is also remembered for starting the first rat colony in the United States to be used for nutrition research. His reputation has suffered from posthumous controversy. "Time" magazine called him Dr.Vitamin. His rule was, "Eat what you want after you have eaten what you should."
Living at a time when vitamins were unknown, he asked and tried to answer the questions, "How many dietary essentials are there, and what are they?" He and Marguerite Davis discovered the first vitamin, namedA, in 1913. McCollum also helped to discover vitaminB and vitaminD and worked out the effect of trace elements in the diet.
As a worker in Wisconsin and later at Johns Hopkins, McCollum acted partly at the request of the dairy industry. When he said that milk was "the greatest of all protective foods", milk consumption in the United States doubled between 1918 and 1928. McCollum also promoted leafy greens, which had no industry advocates.
McCollum wrote in his 1918 medical textbook (which initially had the title of "The Newer Knowledge of Nutrition") that lacto vegetarianism is, "when the diet is properly planned, the most highly satisfactory plan which can be adopted in the nutrition of man".
Family and education.
McCollum's ancestors immigrated to the United States from Scotland in 1763. McCollum was born in 1879 to Cornelius Armstrong McCollum and Martha Catherine Kidwell McCollum on a farm from Redfield, Kansas, usually reported to have been Fort Scott, Kansas, which was away. His parents had little education but became relatively well-off by local standards.
He spent his first seventeen years on this farm and attended a one-room school. He had one brother, Burton, and three sisters. At some point he had surgery for a detached retina, which the doctors were unable to "glue back again". His father suffered from tuberculosis. His mother, who had only two winters of schooling but was devoted to her children's education, took McCollum and his brother to the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. All three of his sisters graduated from Lombard University and married Universalist ministers. A lifelong close friend of his brother's, Burton became a geophysicist who helped to pioneer the use of sound waves in oil drilling. In 1896 his mother moved their family to Lawrence, Kansas, where they hoped to profit from a fruit farm adjoining the University of Kansas. They planted peach, apple, and plum trees and acres of raspberries and blackberries, all of which took some years to mature.
McCollum failed the general certification examination, but was allowed to enter high school provisionally based on his habit of extensive reading and his memorization of standard poetry. Though extremely shy around girls, he was elected class president in his junior and senior years. He fell in love with the school's "Encyclopædia Britannica", purchased a set for $25 (about two months of his earnings), and used it for twenty-five years until he bought a new edition. In high school he joined the Unitarian church. He worked his way through high school and college, including time spent as a gas lamplighter.
While a junior in college, McCollum was elected to Sigma Xi, a non-profit honor society for those interested in science and engineering. As his mother had hoped, McCollum graduated from the University of Kansas in 1903. While there, he abandoned the dream of becoming a doctor, and during his sophomore year, he consumed organic chemistry, earning a bachelor's degree in three years, followed by his master's in 1904. He secured a scholarship to Yale University in 1904, and wrote his thesis on pyrimidines. McCollum got his Ph.D. from Yale in two years. He remained for another year as a postdoctoral researcher working with Thomas Osborne and Lafayette Mendel on plant protein and diet. Then Mendel found a position for McCollum at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, not in his preferred organic chemistry, but as an instructor in agricultural chemistry, where Dennis Robert Hoagland enrolled as a master's student in 1912/1913.
In 1907 he married Constance Carruth, whom he had known in Lawrence. They had five children (Donald, Jean, Margaret, Kathleen, and Elsbeth). The two divorced later in life. When he was living in Baltimore, in 1945, he married J.Ernestine Becker, a dietitian and co-author of one of his books.
Single-grain experiment.
In Wisconsin, McCollum was assigned to analyze cow feed and the animal's milk, blood, feces, and urine for the famous single-grain experiment, directed by department chief Stephen Babcock and his successor Edwin B. Hart. The experiment ran for four years until 1911.
Babcock had studied for his Ph.D. at the University of Göttingen in Germany prior to working at the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station and then joining the staff in Wisconsin. During this era, German chemists were trying to create the perfect foods for farm animals. Due to discoveries by Justus von Liebig and others, they thought that any feed that contains a set amount of protein, carbohydrates, fats, salts, and water was equivalent to any other. Babcock did not believe them, and joked with his German colleagues that cows could survive on coal and ground-up leather according to their calculations. After Hart replaced him as department chief in 1906, Babcock and others created an experiment to test his hypothesis.
Sixteen calves were purchased on the market. One was part Jersey and one was part Guernsey. Three out of four groups of calves were given feed prepared from a single grain and raised until they had had two pregnancies. One group received wheat, the second received oats, while the third ate only corn. A fourth group received a combination of all three grains. After the first year, only the corn group was thriving, and the others and their young were weak or dying. The wheat group was the worst off, and the oats and mixed groups were in between. Then the weak cows were fed corn. They recovered and bore healthy calves.
Hart and his team published their findings in 1911 in "Physiological Effect on Growth and Reproduction of Rations Balanced from Restricted Sources". The researchers and Babcock, the leader, could see the results but, they write, "At present we have no solution for the observations made." McCollum summarized, "something fundamental remained to be discovered."
Rat colony.
Searching for a breakthrough in human and animal nutrition, McCollum purchased all thirty-seven volumes of Richard Maly's "Jahresbericht Über Die Fortschritte Der Tier-Chemie" so he could read them at home. He read of about 13 experiments done between 1873 and 1906 on small animals, often mice, fed restricted diets. In all cases, the animals failed to thrive and died in a few weeks. McCollum determined that he must find out what was lacking in their purified diets, and that he needed to experiment on animals with a short life span, finally deciding on rats. Rats are omnivorous, and cheaply fed, matured quickly, and "had little sentimental and no positive economic value". The dean of the college of agriculture would not support experiments with what he feared was vermin, but Babcock, who was retired, understood the rats' importance and told McCollum to proceed. Using skills he developed with his brother when they were children, McCollum captured some rats from a horse barn, but they were too vicious and wild. He replaced them with twelve young albino rats with some domestication that he bought for $6 from a Chicago pet store. His rat colony, started in January 1908, was the first in America used for nutrition research.
Early error.
McCollum decided that some diets failed because they lacked "palatability". He thought that if a diet tasted good, and the animals ate more food, then nutrition would be adequate. In 1911 Osborne and Mendel criticized McCollum's hypothesis and his data, when they found that plant protein diets needed to be supplemented with protein-free milk. Rats would then eat purified diets without flavorings. Further, Mendel and Osborne suggested in their papers that McCollum had been less than careful in his experiments. Embarrassed, McCollum acknowledged his error.
Discovery of vitamin A.
He was still responsible for the care of the heifers until 1911, and the care and feeding of his rats fell to a new volunteer, Marguerite Davis, a home economics-turned-biochemistry student who looked out for them daily, unpaid for five years. She earned $600 for her sixth and final year. Davis helped McCollum develop "the biological method for the analysis of food", and she co-authored a number of papers. Among them was "The Necessity Of Certain Lipins In The Diet During Growth" in 1913. They fed rats pure casein, carbohydrates (lactose, dextrine, and/or starch), with a little agar-agar and a mixture of six or seven salts. They substituted lard or olive oil for some of the carbohydrates for a group of rats. For 70 to 120 days, their rats grew, and then they stopped growing. They still appeared to be healthy, except the females did not have enough milk to nourish their young. They successfully restored about thirty rats to normality, after these rats had reached the stage of growth suspension, by adding a small amount of extracts of egg or butter. Their paper included charts for five rats, illustrating their weights over time compared to a normal growth curve, meant to show McCollum and Davis's "almost invariable success in inducing a resumption of growth after complete suspension for a time". One chart showed their results with a fat-free diet. They became convinced that without a substance in the egg or butter extract, rats could not grow, even though they appeared to be healthy.
They concluded that rats stop growing until they are fed certain "ether extracts of egg or of butter", and that "there are certain accessory articles in certain food-stuffs which are essential for normal growth for extended periods". They also found this food factor in extracts of alfalfa leaves and in organ meats. This substance that McCollum called "factor A," was later called vitamin A.
McCollum and Davis, who ultimately received credit for the discovery, submitted their paper for publication three weeks before Osborne and Mendel. Both papers appeared in the same issue of the "Journal of Biological Chemistry" in 1913. This turned out to be a very close call given that learning about vitaminA took scientists about 130 years, beginning with François Magendie in 1816 through its synthesis in 1947.
Davis published with McCollum from 1909 to 1916, and Nina Simmonds did the same from 1916 to 1929. In the space of six years, McCollum was promoted from instructor to assistant professor, associate professor, and then full professor. He thought that a professor succeeds with his students, "by his ability to make his conversations and lectures more interesting than song, dance, drink and fast driving".
Discovery of vitamin B.
Looking at beriberi and the problem of polished rice, Christiaan Eijkman and Gerrit Grijns were trying to find the cause of polyneuritis (influenced by Louis Pasteur. Eijkman thought bacteria caused beriberi), but McCollum's approach differed in that he was seeking the reason for failure in growth. McCollum and Davis's experiments with rat diets led to the discovery that Eijkman's and Grijns' anti-neuritic substance was the same as their water-soluble B (B vitamins) in 1915. The finding is number8 in their list of conclusions, "The water-soluble accessory is not the same one as is furnished by butterfat. 20 percent addition of butterfat does not induce any growth unless the other accessory is supplied." He later found that B is actually combined from many different compounds. In 1916 McCollum and Cornelia Kennedy named the factors with alphabetical letters.
Opposition to the new word "vitamine".
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):
"We would, therefore, suggest the desirability of discontinuing the use of the term vitamine, and the substitution of the term fat-soluble A and water-soluble B for the two classes of unknown substances concerned in inducing growth."
In 1920 Jack Drummond noted that the rules of nomenclature