Understanding vitamins helps in understanding human immunity. The work of a Japanese scientist half a century ago was the turning point in unlocking the mysteries of vitamins and shaping medical research.
Umetaro Suzuki was born to a farmer on April 7, 1874, in Makinohara, Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan. He went on to graduate from the Tokyo Imperial University and subsequently worked as a research scientist at Riken. In 1901, he studied Peptide synthesis at the Humboldt University of Berlin under German chemist Emil Fischer.
In 1906, Suzuki returned to Japan, and accepted a post as professor of agricultural chemistry at Tokyo Imperial University the following year. In 1910, Suzuki succeeded in extracting a water-soluble complex of micronutrients from rice bran and named it aberic acid, which had the effect of curing beriberi – a deficiency of thiamine, or vitamin B1, which is necessary for digestion and metabolism in human beings.
He published this discovery in a Japanese scientific journal. However, when the article was translated into German, it failed to state that it was a newly discovered nutrient, a claim made in the original Japanese article.
Hence, Suzuki’s discovery failed to get noticed. Also, his findings were initially dismissed by the medical community which thought beriberi was caused by microbial infection. In 1912, Polish biochemist Kazimierz Funk isolated the same complex of micronutrients and proposed that it be named “vitamine” (from “vital amine”).
Since 1935, this compound began to be described as thiamine. However, Suzuki’s research was among the earliest in modern vitamin research, and made way for newer learnings that later helped spur medical research and the fight against several diseases. Suzuki died on September 20, 1943, in Tokyo, but the Japanese Patent Office, recognising his contributions, named him one among Ten Japanese Great Inventors on April 18, 1985.
During his life, Suzuki was a member of the Imperial Academy, and became a recipient of the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Sacred Treasure and the Order of culture.