VITAMINS—PAST AND PRESENT

[摘要] IT is with gratitude and humble appreciation on that I accept the Borden Award for 1954 from the American Academy of Pediatrics. The feeling of gratitude is based on the acknowledgment by pediatric peers and colleagues of research activity conducted over a period of many years. This happens to be the first occasion that a recipient of the Borden Award given by the Academy of Pediatrics has received previously a Borden Award given by the American Institute of Nutrition for the year 1951. I am inclined to see in this event, a welcome justification and support of my professional career with its division of activities between the clinical-pediatric and the experimental-nutritional fields.In accordance with the stipulation of the Award Committee it is proposed to give in the following, a summary of the research work for which the award was granted. The results achieved were made possible by the cooperation of a large number of helpful collaborators.The problem of qualitative nutrition has been recognized early to be of paramount importance for the dietary management of the growing organism: infant and child. Vitamins are part of this over-all problem. As a young, beginning pediatrician in the early Twenties, deeply immersed in the clinico-chemical study of rickets and tetany, I had been particularly impressed by the use of animals for the solution of nutritional problems. At that time, the group working under McCollum, Park and their associates at Johns Hopkins, as well as Alfred Hess and Steinbock had published their classical studies on experimental rickets in rats. My first attempt to duplicate their observations, including those on the activation of inert oils by ultraviolet irradiation as potent preventives of experimental rickets, had been—for reasons never understood —unsuccessful.

[学科分类] 儿科学