NOTEWORTHY INVENTIONS:
NIACIN
• "Pellagra" is Italian for "rough skin." It's a disease whose first symptom is irritated skin, and it is eventually fatal if left untreated. • In the early 1900s pellagra was rampant in the deep south, and the Public Health Service hired Joseph Goldberger to find out why. His first discovery was that it was common among prisoners, children in orphanages, and patients in mental institutions. Yet he never found a single doctor, nurse, nun, or prison guard who also had the disease. • Theory held that pellagra was a contagious disease, but Goldberger became convinced that it was tied to the diet. In the Methodist Orphan Asylum in Jackson, Mississippi, one third of the children suffered from pellagra. However, all of the victims were between the ages of 6 and 12. He discovered that only the children between the ages of 1 and 5 were given milk to drink. And only the children over the age of 12 were given much meat. Between the age of 6 and 12, the orphans received no milk and little meat. They survived on grits, mush, and sow belly. And they got pellagra.
• Goldberger convinced the orphanage to change the children's diet, giving them lots of meat, milk, and eggs. Pellagra disappeared. • Wanting to be thorough, Goldberger decided that if he could cure the disease with proper diet, he ought to be able to induce it through faulty diet. At the prison farm near Jackson, he signed up 12 prisoners who were willing to go on a special diet in exchange for a pardon at the end of six months. He fed them biscuits, mush, grits, gravy, syrup, corn bread, rice, coffee and sugar. After a few weeks, the men started showing the signs of pellagra.