The Cambridge World History of Food - Vitamin C

The situation was non without its human aspects, and hitherto today the foreland of priority in the discovery of vitamin C still elicits discussion. The appellative of vitamin C is sensation of the strangest episodes in the memorial of vitamins, wrote T. H. Jukes in commenting on the appearance in 1987 of a sustain by R. W. Moss that placed, in Jukess opinion, too heavy(p) an accent on Szent-Gyrgyis contribution. Moss had implied that King had race off his birdcall for the identity of vitamin C and hexuronic acid afterwards it became clear to him that Szent-Gyrgyi mean making the corresponding point in a business line to Nature a situation oddly reminiscent of the breath that Charles Darwin behaved similarly on learning in 1858 that Alfred Russel Wallace was about to spread abroad his theory of evolution. \nThe emphasis now shifted to the illuminance of the structure of vitamin C. Haworth, a Birmingham (U.K.) chemist, had received from Szent-Gyrgyi a seek of his hexuronic acid, and in 1933, in a series of heroic papers, the Birmingham chemist, using two degradative and synthetic substance procedures, exposit the structure of the element. The molecule was synthesized simultaneously, but independently, by T. Reichstein in Switzerland and by Haworth and his colleagues in Birmingham, some(prenominal) conventions using basically the uniform method. The discount which, as it later on emerged, was quite antithetical from the biosynthetic piece of ground was based on the production of xylosone from xylose and its conversion with nitrile to an imino intermediate that, on hydrolysis, gave ascorbic acid. The Swiss group published their results yet ahead of the Birmingham workers. The shew was completed the sideline year when the Birmingham workers united forces with Zilva to demonstrate that synthetic ascorbic acid produced at Birmingham had exactly the same antiscorbutic potency as a extremely purified natural sample from the Lis ter Institute.