He had a chance to win the Nobel Prize four times, although he never received it. Kazimierz Funk – godfather of vitamins and a healthy lifestyle

Contents

Beautiful Mind
A dispute over a breakthrough
Tests on suitcases
Wind in the sails
Fashion of the future

He went down in history as the founder of the science of vitamins, although he had many more research subjects in his career. Four times nominated for the Nobel Prize, never received the honor of receiving the award. He was a warm, somewhat withdrawn man who wandered the world for many years in search of a place where he would be able to devote himself to scientific research in decent conditions and support his family from it. Throughout his life, he had one goal in mind: to give doctors the tools to prevent disease, not cure it.

Kazimierz Funk is a Polish biochemist, founder of the science of vitamins and author of the term “vitamin”
Thanks to his own investment in equipment for the production of insulin, he helped Poland become the third largest producer of this hormone in the world
He also dealt with hormones and nicotinic acid, he searched for the causes of neoplastic diseases and their relationship with nutrition
He had a huge impact on the fruitful fight of Americans against the syphilis epidemic
He was nominated four times for the Nobel Prize, which he never received
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Beautiful Mind

It was 1910. Kazimierz Funk had just started working at the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine in London. Average conditions – laboratory not sufficiently equipped, no assistants, but still better than the practice in Germany, where he stayed for the last four years. There, he first worked at the Emil Fischer Laboratory in Berlin, but he did not receive any remuneration for his duties. Later – in Wiesbaden – he practiced as a biochemist in a city hospital, but although the job was paid, it ended in a conflict with another researcher, Emil Abderhadlen, who questioned his findings regarding the search for yet undetected substances necessary for the proper development of the body. In London, he was to count on a little more trust from his superiors.

His expression came faster than Funk expected. One day Charles J. Martin – then director of the institute – approached him with the task of discovering the causes of beriberi, a deadly disease in tropical regions where high consumption of refined rice was recorded.

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Martin knew who he was challenging. His employee was an ambitious boy who had already shown that he is not afraid to look for answers and formulate not necessarily popular theories. He knew his roots (son of doctors, father – an eminent dermatologist) and education (high school diploma at the age of 16, then biological studies in Geneva, later chemical studies in Bern, under the supervision of Prof. Stanisław Kostanecki, creator of the theory of plant dyes). He appreciated the achievements so far (defense of his doctoral dissertation in the field of estrogen synthesis at the age of 20!). He understood the importance of his research – on trace elements in humans, the synthesis of amino acids and organic bases, the structure of proteins and carbohydrates, the structure of cysteine and alanine, his own theory of cancer, the method of measuring biochemical parameters of blood and uric acid metabolism. An impressive career start for a 26-year-old.

Funk started his work by… rejecting his boss’s hypothesis. Martin found an obvious link between the consumption of rice and the occurrence of the disease; he developed the theory that during the cleansing process of the product, an ingredient is “lost”, most likely an amino acid, and the lack of it causes a breach in the body. According to the Polish researcher, it was not an amino acid, but a simpler nitrogen-containing compound. It took Funk a few months to extract it from the rice bran.

The effect surpassed his wildest expectations – the obtained substance showed therapeutic effects even at low concentrations. Funk followed the blow and quickly coined a name for it: “vitamin” – from “vita”, meaning “life” and “amine”, that is, “containing an amino group”. His intuition told him that it was one of many vitamins and that it was their lack that caused many diseases that contemporary medicine could not cope with, such as rickets, scurvy, anemia, celiac disease or pellagra. Certain of the breakthroughs of the discovery, he efficiently prepared a publication in which he described the course of work and the results of the research.

A dispute over a breakthrough

The scientific community, however, approached Funk’s findings with great reserve. The superiors were not delighted with the younger colleague’s theory and not only did they not accept the new nomenclature (in the first publication on this subject the name “vitamin” does not appear even once), but they did not even focus in their articles on what was most important for the discoverer – opening a new cards in the history of human nutrition research.

It was quite a blow for the Pole. Even then, the most important thing in his scientific work was for him to support medicine not so much in treatment as in disease prevention, and the discovery of vitamins could significantly help in this. So he started looking for new opportunities and help in spreading his idea. A fellow countryman, Ludwik Rajchman, who was then the head of the Department of Bacteriology at the Royal Institute of Health in London, came to the rescue. As one of the publishers of the Journal of State Medicine, he persuaded Funk to publish his research in this journal. It was a very clever maneuver, because the text was printed as a review article, not an original work – so the approval of the Lister Institute was unnecessary.

Although the conviction of scientists to the vitamin theory was not easy this time (the name itself, which was argued about while proposing its various modifications, also aroused a debate), in the end the Pole achieved success. The term “vitamin” entered the dictionary for good, and the biochemist’s findings marked the beginning of large-scale research on these compounds.

Funk followed the activities of his colleagues and, at the same time, continued his own research. He was constantly looking for other sources of the discovered vitamin and analyzed similar compounds, while in the meantime he was preparing a book in which he described the next stages of the research. The publication appeared in 1914 in Germany and gained immense popularity both in the medical community and outside it, with several editions and translations into other languages.

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Tests on suitcases

Despite the breakthrough of the discovery, the Polish scientist still had to fight for decent working conditions. He continued to complain about the lack of research freedom, assistance and support from colleagues and the institute management. He did not accept the offer of German citizenship, although it would make it easier for him to find a lucrative job and lead a comfortable life in Germany. Before leaving England, he stuck to one of the institutes of the London Oncology Hospital for a while (the analysis of the relationship between diet and cancer development, which he made here, will bear fruit later, when this problem becomes one of the objects of the Pole’s new research), but already in 1915 . left with his wife to the USA.

The United States did not steal Funk’s heart, but neither did nothing to seek his favor. The scientist was again faced with the lack of any support in his research work. The laboratory – if a dark, cramped room, devoid of basic equipment can be called that at all – was not used for scientific work or for a healthy lifestyle. Funk began to fall ill, and his recovery was not helped by financial problems and increasing difficulties with supporting the family. It was only towards the end of his stay in New York that he received a well-paid job, but here he faced the bane of his scientific career – the lack of freedom in conducting research.

The wandering around the States lasted a total of eight years. Funk would not be himself if – despite mounting problems – he had not used this time for hard work. As part of cooperation with a pharmaceutical company, he improved salvarsan and neo-salvarsan, used to treat one of the plagues in society at that time – syphilis; developed (together with Harry Dubin) a medicinal preparation containing vitamins A and D, obtained from cod liver; studied hormones, contributing to the production of synthetic adrenaline; he was also constantly concerned with vitamins and their role in human nutrition.

Despite underestimating the scale of his research, Funk will have to return – as a result of the outbreak of World War II – not only to the USA, but also to settle permanently overseas.

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Wind in the sails

An intimate offer from a longtime friend – Ludwik Rajchman – turned out to be a sufficient temptation to return to the country. Interestingly, it was in Poland that for some time Funk found favorable conditions to work and develop his professional career. Research grant, managerial position at the Department of Biochemistry of the National Institute of Hygiene, well-equipped laboratory, promising research, incl. on nicotinic acid, and the production of insulin from bovine pancreas, numerous publications in the national and foreign medical press, trips to conferences and symposia – all these promised a satisfying and stable professional path.

Unfortunately, the researcher was forced to reach into his own pocket many times at work. Indirectly, thanks to his investment in equipment for the production of insulin, Poland has become the third – next to Denmark and Great Britain – largest producer of this hormone in the world. Eventually, with the expiry of his contract and in the face of the turbulent situation in the country, in 1927 he emigrated again – first to Belgium, then to France.

He settled in Paris for 12 years. Here he found his place, here – in Rueil-Malmaison (a suburb of the French capital), his famous Casa Biochemica was built, i.e. a laboratory at home or – as people used to say, knowing Funk’s professional obsession – a house in a laboratory (apparently there was a truly “artistic disorder” in it with unsigned reagents that the owner could recognize and name in the blink of an eye). The “Paris” period is another research on hormones. The biochemist looked for the properties of female and male sex hormones and tried to isolate some of these compounds (androsterone succeeded). This time also resulted in cooperation with many pharmaceutical companies, both in France and the USA.

After returning to the United States, he joined the US Vitamin Corporation, where he developed research on the effects of vitamins on the functioning of the body and their cooperation with other minerals. The essence of the analyzes was the development of another vitamin and mineral preparation.

This time his work was appreciated faster and on a larger scale. In 1947, the Funka for Medical Research Foundation was established in New York, with which the researcher himself was associated until his retirement. He was still active in the field of science, focusing intensively on searching for the relationship between vitamin deficiency in the diet and the development of cancer. It is ironic that he himself – in 1967 – lost the battle against cancer.

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Fashion of the future

Kazimierz Funk has been professionally active for nearly 60 years. He lived and worked in seven different countries (Poland, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, France, Great Britain, the United States), was fluent in five languages (Polish, English, German, French and ), had two citizenships (Polish and American) , survived two world wars, left behind hundreds of publications and works that are still cited in textbooks and the latest works in the field of biochemistry and organic chemistry.

Today, no one doubts that in the field of vitamin science he has taken the most important and decisive step. Meanwhile, he was nominated four times for the Nobel Prize (twice in the field of physiology or medicine and twice – in chemistry), he never received it. The feeling that accompanied him when he heard his name in laudation in 1929, when Christiaan Eijkman and Frederick Hopkins received the Nobel Prize will remain a mystery. The committee honored them for their discovery of … vitamin A.

Perhaps, however, the lack of the most important honor for a scientist was just another of the many ironies of fate that he experienced during his career. Despite his great talent, extraordinary scientific intuition, enormous knowledge, experience and years of hard work, almost all his life he struggled with unstable financial situation, lack of a permanent place of residence, primitive working conditions and diseases.

A man who, as a small boy with diagnosed hip dysplasia, brought a hunger for knowledge and knowledge of the language of his western neighbors from orthopedic therapy in Germany. A scientist who, long before the fashion for a healthy lifestyle broke out, proclaimed that what and how we eat has a direct impact on how we feel, and that proper diet and physical activity can do wonders for our health. Kazimierz Funk – an explorer whose achievements say more about his contribution to science than she herself.