Nutrition

A 1909 survey of the American South found nearly half of school-aged children carrying hookworm, and a five-year Rockefeller-funded campaign against it measurably raised literacy, which this brief follows into a disease still infecting hundreds of millions today.

A 1913 feeding experiment on rats at a Wisconsin farm station established that fat could carry an essential nutrient — the discovery that gave nutrition science the category of vitamin, and fixed the name, vitamin A, after a decade of dispute over what to call it.

Frederick Hopkins didn't discover a vitamin; he proved by feeding trial that food contains something beyond protein, fat and carbohydrate that animals cannot grow without.

The precisely dated 1944-45 Dutch famine let researchers trace, decades later, how prenatal starvation shaped adult diabetes, heart disease and possibly even grandchildren's health through epigenetic change.

James Lind showed citrus cured scurvy in 1747 and the advice was ignored for decades; Albert Szent-Györgyi isolated the actual compound in 1927 and still needed another scientist's proof to confirm what he had found.

Cod liver oil and sunlight looked like unrelated folk remedies for rickets until researchers proved both worked through the same molecule, vitamin D — a discovery that eliminated a disfiguring childhood disease at national scale.