Google celebrates Albert Szent-Gyorgyi’s birthday, vitamin C’s discovery.
Citrus fruit a day keeps a cancer away!
Search engine giant Google celebrates the life of Hungarian physiologist Albert Szent-Gyorgyi with a Google Doodle, or the tweaked logo of the search engine site that features the contribution of the person, or components of historical events. The new Szent-Gyorgyi doodle is a simple jpeg file showing off fruits like Oranges, Pineapple and lemon. Apparently, all fruits featured in the Google homepage are fruits that contain high-level of vitamin C.
For example, Oranges contain 45 mg (54%) of Vitamin C per 100g of serving, Pineapple contains 36.2 mg (44%) per 100g, and lemon leads among the three with 53.0 mg (64%) of Vitamin C per 100g serving. Strawberry is also featured because the fruit is also a good source of vitamin C with 82mg per 144g serving.
And what’s with the vitamin c-rich fruits invasion on the Google homepage? Well, on Friday (September 16th), marks the 118th birthday of Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, the physiologist who discovered the Vitamin C and the components and reactions of the citric acid cycle. According to Wikipedia, Albert Szent-Gyorgyi is a Nobel Prize Winner in Physiology or Medicine, due to his contributions in the field of the Science of the function of living systems.
Szent-Gyorgyi or Szent-Györgyi was born in Budapest on September 16, 1893. His first studied at the Semmelweis University in 1911, but his WikiPedia entry revealed that he soon “became bored with classes,” and instead of learning from books and teachers, he began research in his uncle’s anatomy lab. His laboratory activities was interrupted in 1914 because he served as an army medic in World War I.
After the war, apparently, he continued his research career, and surprisingly, Albert Szent-Gyorgyi switched schools several times over the next few years, until landing at the University of Groningen where he focused on the study of the chemistry of cellular respiration.
His work on the chemistry of cellular respiration landed him a position as a Rockefeller Foundation fellow at Cambridge University. There, he received his PhD in 1927 for his work on isolating what he then called “hexuronic acid” from adrenal gland tissue. Hexuronic acid is now known as the Ascorbic Acid, an organic compound and one form of Vitamin C.
Albert Szent-Gyorgyi suspected the Hexuronic acid to be the “antiscorbutic factor,” but could not prove it without a biological assay. The “ascorbic acid” study was finally done by King’s laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh. The laboratory obtained the adrenal hexuronic acid indirectly from Albert Szent-Györgyi and proved that it was vitamin C by early 1932.
Albert Szent-Gyorgyi migrated to the United States in 1947 where he married his first wife in 1965, and married his fourth in 1975. He died on October 22, 1986 in Massachusetts at the age of 93.
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