Knowra Frederick Gowland Hopkins Frederick Gowland Hopkins Frederick Gowland Hopkins (1861–1947) was a British biochemist who showed that small dietary factors, later identified as vitamins, are essential for normal growth.
Vitamins : Organic nutrients required in small amounts for normal metabolism, growth, and health. Hopkins’s dietary factors became recognized as this class of essential nutrients.
Accessory food factors : Hopkins’s name for dietary substances needed in addition to proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and minerals. This was his original description of the growth-supporting substances his experiments revealed.
Christiaan Eijkman : A Dutch physician whose studies of beriberi in Java helped establish links between diet and disease. His independent work on rice diets provided another line of evidence for essential dietary factors.
University of Cambridge : A collegiate research university in Cambridge, England, founded in 1209. Hopkins became a leading professor and established his biochemistry research program there.
Nutritional science : The study of how food and nutrients affect organisms and health. His work helped shift the field beyond calories, protein, fat, and carbohydrate.
Rat growth experiments : Feeding studies comparing the growth of young rats on different controlled diets. Hopkins used these experiments to show that purified diets could not support normal growth.
Casimir Funk : A Polish-American biochemist who coined the word “vitamine” in 1912. Funk gave a name to the class of dietary factors Hopkins had described.
Guy's Hospital : A teaching hospital in London founded in 1721. Hopkins studied medicine at Guy’s, gaining the clinical training that preceded his biochemical career.
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine : An annual international award recognizing discoveries in physiology or medicine. Hopkins received the 1929 prize for his discovery of growth-stimulating vitamins.
Casein : The principal family of proteins found in milk. Hopkins supplemented a purified casein-based diet to test whether milk contained additional growth factors.
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