Albert Szent-Györgyi's Discovery of Vitamin C

Dedicated May 11, 2002, at the University of Szeged Albert Szent-Györgyi Medical Faculty in Szeged, Hungary.

Humankind has long suffered from a lack of understanding of basic nutrition. Scurvy was among many diseases suffered due to malnutrition. It wasn’t until the 1930’s that Albert Szent-Györgyi discovered the chemical ascorbic acid—also known as vitamin C—that enables the body to efficiently use carbohydrates, fats, and protein. His discovery was among the foundations of modern nutrition.

Contents

• History of Vitamin C Deficiency and Malnutrition
  
• Vitamin C and the Body
• Albert Szent-Györgyi’s Early Career
• The Discovery of Ascorbic Acid
• Szent-Györgyi’s Nobel and Later Research
• Further Reading
• Landmark Designation and Acknowledgments
• Cite this Page

History of Vitamin C Deficiency and Malnutrition

Those sitting down to nutritious meals usually do not consider what would happen if fresh vegetables and fruit or vitamin-supplemented juices and cereals were not routinely available. Centuries ago, sailors experienced such a lack first-hand: swollen and bleeding gums, loose teeth, hemorrhaging under the skin, and slowed healing of wounds. What we now know as vitamin C was in short supply on most ships, and human bodies reacted by developing the condition known as scurvy. Death could, and often did, quickly follow, thousands of miles away from otherwise life-sustaining provisions.

Scurvy had long been the scourge of those who sailed for extended distances without fresh food and supplies, with the first clear-cut descriptions of the malady appearing in the medieval records of the European Crusades. Toward the end of the 15th century, scurvy was cited as the major cause of disability and mortality among sailors on long sea voyages. Although Danish mariners were long acquainted with the condition, and included lemons and oranges in their marine stores, it was not until 1753 that scurvy was recognized in the British medical community at large as directly related to dietary deficiency.

In 1769, William Stark, a young British physician, began a series of experiments on diet and nutrition, using himself as the experimental subject. After consuming only bread and water for 31 days, Stark added other foods to his diet one by one, including olive oil, figs, goose meat, and milk. In two months, Stark recorded that his gums were red and swollen, bleeding easily to the touch. Seven months later he died, possibly from scurvy, and likely from the cumulative effects of malnutrition. Stark’s diet was heavy on meat and starch, but devoid of fresh vegetables and citrus fruits.

Twelve years before Stark’s ill-fated experiments, Scottish physician James Lind, having observed the preventive and curative powers of citrus fruits and lemon juice during his years as a naval surgeon, wrote a treatise recommending their mandatory consumption by British sailors. By 1795, Lind’s advocacy had resulted in the issuance of lime juice to all naval vessels and the gradual elimination of scurvy within the entire British fleet. At the time, no one, including Lind, knew of the existence of ascorbic acid, which would eventually become commonly known as vitamin C.

It would take more years to pinpoint the scurvy-prevention substance responsible for maintaining the body’s connective tissues. That would take the meticulous work of a brilliant Hungarian-born researcher named Albert Szent-Györgyi, whose isolation and identification of vitamin C and discovery of the metabolic mechanism that enables its use within cells would be recognized with a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

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Vitamin C and the Body

Vitamin C enables the body to efficiently use carbohydrates, fats, and protein. Because vitamin C acts as an antioxidant — a nutrient that chemically binds and neutralizes the tissue-damaging effects of substances known as free radicals — it is vital to the growth and health of bones, teeth, gums, ligaments, and blood vessels. Vitamin C also plays a key role in the formation of collagen, the body’s major building protein, and is therefore essential to the proper functioning of all internal organs.

Vitamin C is found in various foods, including citrus fruits such as oranges, lemons, and grapefruit; in green vegetables such as spinach, broccoli, and cabbage; and in tomatoes and potatoes. Food processing may degrade or destroy vitamin C, as can exposure to air, drying, salting, cooking (especially in copper pots), or processing. (Freezing does not usually cause loss of vitamin C unless foods are stored for a very long time.)

In modern times, access to fresh fruits and vegetables is common, rendering full-blown cases of vitamin C deficiency relatively rare. Cases are normally limited to isolated elderly adults, usually men whose diet is limited to foods lacking in vitamin C, as well as to infants fed reconstituted milk or milk substitutes without a vitamin C or orange juice supplement. Those with certain illnesses, such as AIDS, cancer or tuberculosis, surgical patients, and those exposed to long periods of cold temperatures can also suffer from vitamin C insufficiency.

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Albert Szent-Györgyi’s Early Career

The existence of vitamin C was long suspected. Researchers Axel Holst and Alfred Frohlich had proposed its existence as early as 1907, but no definitive agent emerged as the likely candidate. As researchers struggled to identify the unique substance, one, Albert Szent-Györgyi, in the 1920s, was making experimental connections others did not.

Born to a family that already included three generations of scientists, Szent-Györgyi was interested in science from an early age. He enrolled at the University of Budapest, but his studies were interrupted by the outbreak of World War I. Fervently anti-war throughout his life, Szent-Györgyi wounded himself to escape combat and returned to the university to finish his studies in 1917. He was reputed to have said that he was “overcome with such a mad desire to return to science that one day I grabbed my revolver and in my despair put a shot through my upper arm.”

Szent-Györgyi received a medical degree upon graduation, thereafter studying at various European universities. He began his scientific career by studying the chemical changes that occur when cells utilize foodstuffs, such as carbohydrates, fats, and protein, a process sometimes known as biological combustion. In the course of his studies Szent-Györgyi isolated a molecule from adrenal glands that lost and regained hydrogen atoms. This “hydrogen carrier,” containing six carbon atoms, had the properties of a sugar and an acid. Szent-Györgyi christened it “hexuronic acid.”

In the 1920s, he became interested in cell respiration and energy production in plants, closely investigating the “browning” processes that interrupted or impeded growth and normal functioning. Szent-Györgyi discovered that as plants brown, they do so as a result of damage at the cellular level: a breakdown in the mechanism that supplies enough hydrogen to prevent excessive oxidation.

While conducting a series of experiments on citrus plants, he found that browning could be induced with peroxidase, a plant enzyme active in oxidation. Szent-Györgyi was then able to delay the browning with the addition of citrus juice to the peroxidase. Further experiments allowed Szent-Györgyi to isolate the protective hexuronic-acid agent he believed was active in citrus juice.

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