Born 11 Aug 1858; died 5 Nov 1930 at age 72.

Born 11 Aug 1858; died 5 Nov 1930 at age 72. Dutch scientist, physician, hygienist who demonstrated that beriberi is caused by poor diet led to the discovery of vitamins. He investigated beriberi (Sinhalese word for “extreme weakness”) in the Dutch East Indies in 1886. Because an attendant had been feeding his laboratory chickens with cooked white rice instead of whole rice, Eijkman discovered by accident that diet produced a disease resembling beriberi in human beings. Experimenting with a diet of polished rice, Eijkman reproduced these results (1897). He was the first to recognize that the human disease, too, was caused by lack of essential food factor (later shown to be thiamine, vitamin B1). For this work, he shared (with Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins) the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1929.

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