Conrad Elvehjem
| Conrad Elvehjem | |
|---|---|
Conrad Elvehjem (right)
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| Born |
May 27, 1901 McFarland, Wisconsin |
| Died | July 27, 1962 (aged 61) |
| Fields | Biochemistry |
| Alma mater | University of Wisconsin |
| Known for |
Nutrition niacin |
| Notable awards |
Willard Gibbs Award (1943) Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award (1952) |
Conrad Arnold Elvehjem (May 27, 1901 – July 27, 1962) was internationally known as an American biochemist in nutrition. In 1937 he identified a molecule found in fresh meat and yeast as a new vitamin, nicotinic acid, now called niacin. His discovery led directly to the cure of human pellagra, once a major health problem in the United States.
Conrad Elvehjem, the son of Norwegian emigrants to Wisconsin, was born in McFarland, Wisconsin. He progressed through the secondary schools and the University of Wisconsin, where he received his PhD in 1927 with mentor E.B. Hart for his studies of the importance of copper in iron-deficiency anemia. A National Research Council fellowship permitted a year at Cambridge University in England. Elvehjem began teaching in agricultural chemistry at the University of Wisconsin in 1923, and became a full professor in 1936. He became chairman of the biochemistry department in 1944 and dean of the graduate school in 1946, at 45 years of age. He served as dean of the graduate school until he became university's 13th president in 1958.
Picking up on the work of Joseph Goldberger, he found that nicotinic acid cured black tongue in dogs, an analogous disease to pellagra. In the previous year, Elvehjem and his colleague Carl J. Koehn had found that a filtrate factor from a liver extract could cure diet-induced pellagra in chicks. That filtrate extract was designated as the vitamin G fraction, after the late Goldberger. To confirm their findings in dogs, they induced black tongue in these animals with the Goldberger diet of yellow corn, before supplementing the diet with the vitamin G fraction. Elvehjem and his colleagues later were able to isolate and identify nicotinamide and nictonic acid from vitamin G as the curative factors for black tongue in dogs. He also contributed greatly to the identification of vitamin B complex and was co-author of more than 780 scientific papers on biochemistry and nutrition.
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