Vitamin C
Do you take Vitamin C when you feel a cold coming on? Well, that's not something Roscoe Bartlett could do when he was younger. The first Vitamin C to hit the market was something called Redoxon in 1934, when Roscoe was 8 years old.
For centuries, scientists had been trying to find a way to prevent scurvy, usually stumbling upon teas and fruits that contained Vitamin C. By 1933, a team of Hungarian scientists, Joseph L Svirbely and Albert Szent-Györgyi, succeeded in isolating something they called "ascorbic acid". Vitamin C was synthesized a year later. Szent-Györgyi was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1937.
Szent-Györgyi became a well known figure in Hungary, and when the fascists took control, he used his connections to smuggle his Jewish friends out of the country. Hitler himself ordered the arrest of Szent-Györgyi, and he spent the last two years of World War II as a fugitive from the Gestapo. When the war ended, Szent-Györgyi spent two years under Soviet control until he escaped to the United States in 1947.
In America, Szent-Györgyi became focused on cancer research, and founded the National Foundation for Cancer Research. He died 22 years ago, at the age of 93.
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