Page 146 - Encyclopedia of Chemical Compounds 3 Vols

ASCORBIC ACID

the disease, and the first recorded investigations involving
vitamin C were done by seafaring men. In 1536, French
explorer Jacques Cartier (1491–1557) cured his sailors of
scurvy by following the advice of Indians in Newfoundland,
feeding them extract of pine needles. Scottish physician
James Lind (1716–1794) began investigating the disease in
1747. He read many historical accounts of the diseases and
combined that information with his own observations to
deduce that scurvy occurred only among people with very
limited diets. He went on a ten-week sea voyage and fed the
solders various foods to see which ones were best at curing
scurvy. Citrus fruits proved to be most effective in prevent-
ing the disease, a result that Lind reported in 1753. Captain
James Cook (1728–1779) led expeditions to the South Seas in
the late 1700s and kept his crew healthy by feeding them
sauerkraut. In 1795 the British navy began serving its sailors
a daily portion of lime juice, and two things happened: British
sailors stopped getting scurvy, and people began calling
sailors ‘‘limeys.’’
Many people refused to believe that scurvy was caused by
a dietary deficiency, suggesting that it was instead the result
of eating bad food or lack of exercise. In 1907, Norwegian
biochemists Alex Holst (1861–1931) and Theodore Frohlich
conducted a study in which guinea pigs were fed an experi-
mental diet that caused them to develop scurvy. The link
between the vitamin and the disease was firmly established
by this research. Ascorbic acid was first isolated indepen-
dently by the Hungarian-American biochemist Albert Szent-
Gyo ¨ rgi (1893–1986) and the American biochemist Charles
Glen King (1896–1988) in 1932. It was synthesized a year
later by the English chemist Sir Walter Norman Haworth
(1883–1950) and the Polish-Swiss chemist Tadeusz Reichstein
(1897–1996), again working independently of each other.

HOW IT IS MADE
Plants and most animals (humans and guinea pigs being
two exceptions) synthesize vitamin C in their cells through a
series of reactions in which the sugar galactose is eventually
converted to ascorbic acid. For many years, the compound has
been made commercially by a process known as the Reichstein
process, named after its inventor Tadeusz Reichstein. This
process begins with ordinary glucose, which is converted to
another sugar, sorbitol, which is then fermented to obtain

CHEMICAL COMPOUNDS 95