Sir Gilbert Blane

Sir Gilbert Blane was born on August 29, 1749, at Blanefield, Ayrshire, Scotland the fourth son of a merchant who he was named after. Little is known about his early life other than the fact that he attended school at Kirkoswald and Maybole. At the age of 14 he was accepted into the Faculty of Arts at Edinburgh University, with the intent of joining the church. Soon his course changed and he began studying medicine taking his M.D. from Glasgow University in 1778.

After graduating he traveled to London, where with letters of recommendation he began his medical career. He became the physician of Admiral (later Lord) George Rodney and traveled with Rodney to the West Indies in 1779. Blane soon became the Physician to the Fleet, being appointed over men who had more naval experience than he had. Blane saw action in six engagements and wrote an account of the Battle of Saintes. Upon his return to Britain, Blaine was awarded a pension from the Admiralty.

While he was with the fleet Blane published, at his own expense, his notes on naval hygiene including recommendations on improvements in hygiene and diet aboard naval vessels. One of Blane's recommendations was the inclusion of fruit into the diet of sailors, to prevent scurvy. At the time the British Navy was losing more men from infection and scurvy than it was losing as casualties of battle. Adhering to Blane's recommendations Rodney's fleet lost not a single man to disease or scurvy for a six month period, from December 1781 to May 1782.

Blane was not the first to discover that fresh fruit prevented scurvy in sailors. In 1747 James Lind, a naval surgeon, divided a group of twelve sailors with scurvy into six groups of two and gave each group a different treatment: the first group was given cider, the second dilute sulfuric acid, the third vinegar, the forth sea water, the fifth fresh oranges, the sixth a spicy paste and barley water. The treatment of group five stopped after six days when they ran out of fruit, but by that time one sailor had recovered and the other was on the way to recovery. In 1768-71 Captain James Cook circumnavigated the world and did not lose a single sailor to scurvy, a feat that was attributed to their stopping to replenish supplies of fruit throughout the voyage.

Blane returned to England at the end of the war in 1783 and established a practice being appointed to be physician at St. Thomas Hospital. In 1795 he was appointed commissioner of the Sick and Wounded Board of the Admiralty. As a commissioner he was able to push through the long needed addition of lemon juice to the provisions of British Naval vessels. Tough he did not discover the link between citrus fruit and scurvy prevention it was Blane who made sure that lemon juice was provided to sailors, an advance that provided the British Navy the man power it would need to fight the Napoleonic Wars. Blane married in 1786 and would have six sons and three daughters. He also served as the personal physician for the Prince of Wales, later King George IV. In 1812 he was sent to investigate the ill fateded Walcheren Expedition and for his service to the crown he was created a baronet.

Blane died in his home in Sackville Street, London on June 26, 1834.

References:

Bown, Steven; Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner, and a Gentlemen Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail
; Macmillian; 2005

Leach, R. H.; Sir Gilbert Blane, Bart, MD FRS (1749-1832); Annals Royal College of Surgeons (1980)62:232-239

Wharton, Mary; Sir Gilbert Blane Bt (1749-1834); Annals Royal College of Surgeons (1984)66:375-376

William Cumming Rose

William Cumming Rose was born on April 4, 1885 in Greenville, South Carolina. His father, John M. Rose was a Presbyterian minister and the family moved often. Rose attended a variety of local schools until he was 14 when his father removed him from school because it was not providing enough intellectual stimulation. Thereafter he was tutored by his father who introduced him to Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. He a acquired an interest in chemistry from reading Ira Remsen's An Introduction to the Study Chemistry, a textbook used by his sister. Rose wished to attend a large university, but his father, worried for his sixteen year old son, convinced him to attend Davidson College in North Carolina.

At 19 Rose obtained his B.S. degree and went to Yale University and the Sheffield Scientific School. There he studied biochemistry and worked as an assistant in the laboratory of Layfayette Mendel. In Mendel's lab he did a project on creatine/creatinine metabolism, which formed the basis of his doctoral thesis. He graduated in 1911.

After graduating he obtained a position as an instructor in physiological chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania. Then after a short time studying in Germany, in the laboratory of Professor Franz Knoop at the University of Freiburg, he accepted an appointment at the University of Texas, where he organized the first biochemistry course for medical students. He remained in Texas for nine years. In 1922 he went to the University of Illinois, as professor of physiological chemistry (the title was changed to professor of biochemistry in 1936). Rose remained at the University of Illinois until his retirement in 1955.

Although he was interested in many aspects of metabolism, Rose's work focused on amino acid metabolism and nutrition. Amino acids are the units which form proteins (For a review of amino acids see here). There are twenty different amino acids which animals and plants use to put together proteins. Some of these can be synthesized in vivo and a are called nonessential. Others that cannot be synthesized and must come from diet are called essential. In an experiment Rose fed rats with the nineteen amino acids known at the time as their sole source of nitrogen and the rats lost weight. Using the laborious isolation techniques available before chromatography, Rose and his colleagues where able to isolate the amino acid threonine, which when added to the rat's diet allowed them to gain weight.

Over the next twenty years Rose experimented to determine which amino acids were essential and nonessential for rats by excluding them from their diet. He determined that rats required nine essential amino acids (including threonine) in their diet and one, arginine, was only essential for optimal growth. In 1942 Rose began a similar set of experiments to determine which amino acids were essential for humans, using male graduate students as experimental subjects (an account of the experiment can be found here). The subjects urine and feces were examined to determine nitrogen balance. The experiments concluded that there were eight essential required in the human diet.

Rose served on the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Research Council and was instrumental on advising government agencies on nutritional requirements. From 1939 to 1941 Rose served as the president of the American Society of Biochemists. On his ninetieth birthday the William C. Rose Lectureship was established to honor biochemists for outstanding research into biochemistry and molecular biology and a commitment to training younger scientists. The William C. Rose award, as it was renamed, is given annually by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

Rose died on September 15, 1985.

References:

Carter, Herbert E. and Coon, Minor J.; "William Cumming Rose" at National Academy Press (www.nap.edu)

Roe, Daphne; "William Cumming Rose"; Journal of Nutrition (1981)111:1311-1320

Simoni, Robert D., Hill, Robert L., and Vaughan, Martha; "The Discovery of the Amino Acid Threonine: the Work of William C. Rose"; Journal of Biological Chemistry (2002) 277, e25