Technikatörténeti szemle 22. (1996)

Papers from the Second International Conference on the History of Chemistry and Chemical Industry (Eger, Hungary, 16–19 August, 1995) - Hannus, István: Albert Szent-Györgyi in the New York Times

The next few years was a hectic period for Hungary because of the war and the ensuing Trianon peace treaty. And it was just as hectic for SzentGyörgyi. He worked successively in Pozsony (today Bratislava), Budapest, Prague and Berlin; just a few months in ech. Then came a longer period in Hamburg. Later, he went to The Netherlands, where in Leiden and especially Groningen he worked successfully on biological combustion. At that time, the main question is biochemistry was the subject of controversy between Heinrich Wieland and Otto Warburg and their followers. Nomen est omen. H. Wieland held that "the dehydrogenation of substrates was the basic process involved in biological oxidation and that oxygen reacts directly with such activated hydrogen atoms"

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. O. Warburg considered that activated oxygen was essential for biological oxidation. Albert Szent-Györgyi recounted "I got interested in the controversy and found a very simple way to show that both were right, that active oxygen oxidized active hydrogen. I wrote a very nice paper about it."

3 This later became a landmark of 20th century biochemistry. Cambridge in England, his next workplace, became his scientific home, where he received his PhD in chemistry. In Groningen he had detected a strong reducing (anti-oxidant) substance in the adrenal gland. A similar material was found in lemon and orange juice and watery extracts of cabbages. He extracted and purified it in Cambridge (about 1 g, good crystals), and it proved to be a carbohydrate, probably a sugar acid, with the chemical formula C

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H

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. At that time, 1 g was not enough for a detailed structural analysis. His findings immediately aroused interest among biochemists worldwide and he submitted a manuscript to the Biochemical Journal; in this he finally had to decide on a name for what had simply been called "Szent-Györgyi's substance". He proposed calling it "Ignose", from the Latin "Ignosco" ("I don't know"), while the ending "-ose" means a sugar compound. With this name, the manuscript was not accepted. Szent-Györgyi resubmitted it, renaming his compound "Godnose". Finally, the editor suggested the much more prosaic „hexuronic acid" and the paper was published with this nomenclature. Szent-Györgyi received a professorship in Szeged, Hungary in September 1930. In 1931 it emerged that hexuronic acid and vitamin C are one and the same, and in 1932 Szent-Györgyi found that paprika is "a regular mine of vitamin C". Since paprika is not a particularly sweet fruit, there was less difficulty in separating vitamin C from other sugar compounds than in the case of oranges, for example. 1.5 kg pure, crystalline vitamin C was produced from paprika during a week. This was ample for a detailed chemical analysis. Some was sent to N. Haworth (Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1937) in Birmingham, who quickly established its chemical nature (see Figure 1). The