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You probably learned that the word vitamin comes from "vital amine". That word was coined by one young chemist, Casimir Funk, in 1912. His naming spread fast, his chemistry was only partly right, and the question of how much credit he deserves was argued over at a Nobel Prize lecture. This post covers what Funk did, where the name came from, and what his story shows about naming ideas in science.
Who was Casimir Funk?
The American National Biography entry on Funk lists him as Casimir Funk, 1884 to 1967, biochemist, and the *Journal of the American Medical Association* ran a 1967 profile of him as a vitamin chemist. His main papers on the subject appeared in the *Journal of Physiology* in 1911 and 1912, when he was in his twenties.
His starting point was the work on beriberi that began with Christiaan Eijkman's chickens. Our post on Christiaan Eijkman and beriberi tells that story. By 1911 it was known that the outer layers of rice contained something that cured the disease. Funk set out to find what it was.
How did Funk hunt for the curative substance?
His 1911 paper on the chemical nature of the substance which cures polyneuritis in birds describes the method. Pigeons fed on polished rice developed polyneuritis, a beriberi-like paralysis, after about three weeks on average. He then tested each chemical fraction from rice polishings on birds so ill that, untreated, they would die within 12 hours. Active fractions cured them in 6 to 12 hours. Large doses of crude extract were poisonous, which he traced to choline carried along with the active substance.
He extracted the polishings with alcohol containing hydrochloric acid, and precipitated the active material with phosphotungstic acid. His 1912 follow-up paper reports colourless needle crystals melting at 233 °C, of which about 0.02 g rapidly cured a sick pigeon. Because the yield was tiny, he turned to yeast as a richer source.
Where did the word vitamine come from?
In June 1912 Funk published a long review, *The etiology of the deficiency diseases*, in the *Journal of State Medicine*. Frederick Gowland Hopkins described it in his 1929 Nobel lecture as "a valuable summary of the existing knowledge" which showed "how definite a group is constituted by these diseases". Hopkins added that Funk suggested, ahead of general opinion, that pellagra would prove to be one of them, and that each deficiency disease might depend on its own specific missing factor.
In that review Funk called these substances vitamines. The NCERT Class 12 Biomolecules unit explains the name: vital plus amine, because the first compounds identified had amino groups. Later work showed most of them have no amino group.
The fix came in 1920. In a one-page note in the Biochemical Journal, The nomenclature of the so-called accessory food factors (vitamins), Jack Drummond pointed out that the ending -ine is reserved for basic substances and that there was no evidence these factors were amines. Because the word was already widely used, he suggested simply dropping the final e. Vitamin is the result.
Did Funk discover vitamins?
Hopkins gave a careful answer in the same lecture. He said the question of who discovered vitamins "has no clear answer", and that Funk had not isolated any substance later accepted as a B vitamin. He also disputed Funk's account of their priority. Yet he closed by saying Funk "has not received too much, but too little, credit for his vitamin work as a whole". And Hopkins began the lecture by saying these substances, "following the suggestion of Casimir Funk, we have agreed to call vitamins".
So Funk's lasting contributions were a framework and a name: a clear class of deficiency diseases, each caused by lack of a specific factor, and a word for those factors. Our post on Frederick Gowland Hopkins and accessory food factors covers the feeding experiments that came at the problem from the other side.
How should a student read the word vitamin today?
The name is historical, not chemical. Vitamin C (ascorbic acid) and vitamin A contain no amino group.
The grouping still holds. NCERT's split into fat-soluble (A, D, E, K) and water-soluble (B group and C) vitamins is about how the body stores them, not about amines.
One disease, one factor. Funk's idea that each deficiency disease has its own missing substance is how you still learn them: B1 and beriberi, C and scurvy, D and rickets.
If you want to connect vitamin names to their structures and roles, the Fermi Concept Library covers every concept in physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics and computing, one idea at a time.
What can a student learn from Funk?
A clear summary can move a field. His most influential paper was a review that organised other people's results.
A name is a hypothesis. "Vital amine" carried a guess about chemistry that turned out wrong. Check what a name assumes.
Use a fast test. His pigeon assay gave an answer in hours, which made a long chemical separation possible.
Try it now: pick three vitamins from the NCERT table and look up whether each contains nitrogen at all.
