Vitamin C: Past-to-Present Vitamin C has a long and colorful
history. Before it was known by its current name, its importance
was realized by people of many cultures. In the 1750's, Dr.
James Lind demonstrated the importance of citrus fruit in
preventing scurvy among sailors and led to the nickname "limeys"
for British mariners. Perhaps less well-known is that the name
"ascorbic acid" comes from similar roots, "antiscorbutic," being
the technical term for anti-scurvy. The fact that we have to
take vitamin C at all seems to be a sort of biological accident,
probably a genetic mutation, which happened hundreds of
thousands of years ago. Virtually all animals can produce
ascorbate from glucose in their liver _ through a step-wise
biochemical chain of reactions, each mediated by a specific
enzyme. In humans, the last enzyme in the series is missing, and
it is the loss of this unit that accounts for the vast majority
of people in the world being short of acceptable amounts of
vitamin C for optimal health and longe