In 1883, a young Dutch physician, Christiaan Eijkman, arrived to work on the island of Java in the Dutch East Indies. Born in 1858, he took his preliminary examinations in 1875, became a student at the Military Medical School of the University of Amsterdam, and obtained his doctorate by working on the physiology of the nervous system. In Java, he worked as a medical officer until 1885, when he contracted malaria and returned to Europe on sick leave.

In Europe, he had the opportunity to work in several laboratories, including that of Robert Koch in Berlin. He returned to Java in 1887 as member of a commission investigating the beriberi epidemic sweeping through the area, particularly in prisons, asylums, and military barracks, causing paralysis, heart failure, wasting, mental changes, and death. The commission failed to find an organism that was causing the disease and went home. Eijkman remained in Java as director of the Javanese medical school and laboratories. He was able to carry out several studies, of which the most important was that on vitamins.

Eijkman noticed that the chickens in his laboratory unexpectedly developed symptoms resembling beriberi, staggering about but then inexplicably recovering. Looking for reasons for this recovery, he discovered that a new cook had decided to save money and had started feeding the chickens with cheap, unpolished brown rice; remarkably, the chickens improved after their diet was altered. Eijkman then discovered that he could reproduce the chickens’ illness by feeding them polished (white) rather than unpolished rice. He published his findings through the 1890s, postulating that the polished white rice contained a toxin that was not present in unpolished brown rice.

In 1898, Eijkman returned to the Netherlands. He became professor of hygiene and forensic medicine at Utrecht. In 1907, he was appointed member of the Royal Academy of Sciences of the Netherlands. The Dutch Government honored him for his scientific contributions and conferred upon him several orders of knighthood.

Meanwhile in Britain, in 1906, Frederick Gowland Hopkins carried out a series of experiments which led him to propose that certain minute quantities of “accessory food factors” were essential to animal health and life. Following his lead, in 1910, Japanese scientist Umetaro Suzuki succeeded in extracting from rice bran a water-soluble complex of micronutrients which he named aberic acid and could cure beriberi. In 1913, Casimir Funk isolated the same complex of micronutrients and proposed it should be named “vitamine” (from “vital amine”). Also in 1913, Marguerite Davis and Elmer McCollum discovered vitamin A, distinguished from the water-soluble substance of rice by being fat soluble.

In 1926, Barend Jansen and Willem Donath isolated and crystallized the water-soluble substance that could cure beriberi. Between 1933 and 1936, Robert R. Williams successfully synthesized it, determined its structure, proposed the name thiamin by combining “thio-” (indicating the presence of sulfur) and “-amine” (indicating the amino group).

The fascinating story of the discovery of vitamins begins with Eijkman’s astute observation in feeding chickens. He received the Nobel Prize more than three decades later, dying in Utrecht in 1930 and worthy of being honored along with several other scientists in this remarkable effort.