1929 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine — Eijkman and Hopkins

What You Will Learn

In an era when everyone believed that all diseases were caused by pathogens, discover how two researchers, from different angles, demonstrated the existence of “diseases caused by absence,” and how their discovery led to the word “vitamin,” which we use every day.

Diseases Without Pathogens

Until 1929, medicine was dominated by a powerful paradigm: “All diseases are caused by pathogens.” The golden age of bacteriology, with Koch, Pasteur, and Ehrlich, solidified this paradigm. Bacteria, protozoa, viruses — finding the cause of a disease meant finding a microorganism.

However, there were diseases that this paradigm simply could not explain: beriberi, scurvy, rickets. No matter how hard they looked, they couldn't find any pathogens. The diseases were not transmitted from person to person. They appeared repeatedly in specific population groups in different regions.

The answer to these strange diseases emerged that year. The answer was to overturn the paradigm itself: “These are diseases caused by absence.” It’s not about what’s there, but about what’s missing. This shift in thinking led to the multivitamin supplements we consume daily.

The Zeitgeist — In the Shadow of Black Thursday

On October 24, 1929, stock prices plummeted on the New York Stock Exchange: “Black Thursday.” From this day on, the American economy, and the world economy, plunged into the Great Depression, which lasted for more than a decade. The roaring twenties, with its jazz, automobiles, and new rich, came to an abrupt end that late autumn.

The Nobel Prize announcement took place on October 30 of that year, six days after Black Thursday. The world had not yet fully realized the scale of the collapse, but the front pages of newspapers were already dominated by the stock market crash. The story of the two researchers who discovered that “deficiency causes disease” was relegated to the back pages and received little attention. It is an ironic backdrop – in the following years, as the Great Depression deepened and malnutrition became widespread in American and European cities, the research of these two men was suddenly cited in the public health policies of various governments.

At the time, the scientific community was also in a period of upheaval in physics. Einstein published his first attempt at a unified field theory (January), and Hubble confirmed the expansion of the universe with observational data a few months later. At a time when the worldview itself was being shaken, the old worldview of medicine, “disease is invasion,” also began to crumble.

If we look at the Korean historical context, November 3, 1929, is the day of the Gwangju Student Movement. A minor collision on a commuter train escalated into an anti-Japanese demonstration by students throughout Gwangju, which soon spread throughout the country. While in Europe, the discovery that “deficiency causes disease” was awarded the Nobel Prize that month, in Korea, students were demonstrating the principle of “how deprived freedom explodes into protest.” Different deficiencies, different demonstrations.

Biographical Narratives — A Military Doctor in Java and a Fastidious Biochemist in Cambridge

The two laureates were very different people.

Eijkman — When Observation Turns a Hypothesis on Its Head

Christiaan Eijkman was born in the Netherlands in 1858. After training as a military doctor, he was sent to the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia). When he arrived, beriberi was rampant among the Dutch army and indigenous laborers in Java. A disease that causes numbness in the legs, swelling of the heart, and eventually death.

At the time, the prevailing hypothesis was the infection hypothesis. The belief was that there must be some pathogen. Eijkman himself started with this hypothesis. He spent several years repeating bacterial cultures and infection experiments, but he found no answer.

The breakthrough came by chance. The chickens in his laboratory suddenly began to show the exact same symptoms as beriberi. The cause? At the time, he was feeding the chickens in his lab refined white rice, the leftover from the hospital kitchen. After the diet was changed back to brown rice (unpolished rice), the chickens’ symptoms disappeared.

Eijkman’s initial interpretation was actually wrong. He initially thought that “white rice contains a toxin.” He interpreted it as a problem of presence, not absence. However, his student, Grains, reinterpreted it as a hypothesis of deficiency: “There is something in the rice bran that is necessary, and removing it causes the disease.” Eijkman overturned his original hypothesis and accepted this deficiency framework.

This attitude is what earned him the Nobel Prize. The ability to overturn a hypothesis and follow the direction the data points to, rather than clinging to his own hypothesis.

Hopkins — The Fastidiousness of Purified Diets

Frederick Gowland Hopkins was born in England in 1861. He was a biochemist at Cambridge University. His approach was completely different from Eijkman’s — not clinical observation, but extremely controlled laboratory experiments.

He divided mice into two groups. One group was fed a completely purified diet consisting of casein (protein), lard (fat), starch (carbohydrate), salt, and water. The other group was given the same diet with an additional 3 ml of milk.

The purified diet group stopped growing and became weak. The group with the 3 ml of milk grew normally. Hopkins repeated this experiment with several combinations, and he clearly showed that an extremely small amount of something was essential for normal growth. He called this essential substance an “accessory food factor.” The word “vitamin” had not been coined yet.

The reason Hopkins’ discovery was crucial was because of the research method itself. Clinical observations are noisy and it is difficult to confirm cause and effect. Hopkins repeatedly demonstrated, in the laboratory, that by controlling all other variables, an extremely small substance could reverse the growth results. This was undeniable data.

Key Achievements — The Concept of Deficiency in the CS Framework

A Shift in the Paradigm: Not About What's There, But What's Missing

The real meaning of these two discoveries was not the discovery of specific substances. It was that they opened a new paradigm, from “disease is invasion” to “disease is deficiency.”

The CS analogy fits naturally here. This is exactly the same as diagnosing what is causing a program to crash when it is not running.

• The old paradigm: If a program malfunctions, there must be a bug (invasion). There is an incorrect value, a malicious input, or memory corruption. This is the same as Koch’s principle of infectious diseases.
• The new paradigm: The real common cause of a program malfunctioning is that something is missing. A dependency library is not installed, an environment variable is not set, or a necessary file is missing.

Think of the error ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'requests' in the build log. This is not an invasion. It is an error caused by absence. The solution is not to find the invader, but to fill in what is missing. pip install requests.

For a long time, 19th-century medicine saw disease only as “invasion.” Eijkman and Hopkins demonstrated that a considerable number of diseases are actually a “missing dependency.” Beriberi is a state where thiamine (B1) is missing. Scurvy is a state where vitamin C is missing. Rickets is a state where vitamin D is missing.

However, this analogy breaks down here. In software, dependencies are explicitly declared, so the logs accurately tell you what is missing. However, in human metabolism, there is no explicit list of dependencies. In order to know what is missing, you have to repeatedly reproduce the difference between having the substance and not having it in an experiment. This is why Hopkins repeated the purified diet experiments for years. It was a process of reverse-engineering the dependency list of the human body.

The Name “Vitamin”

Eijkman’s observations and Hopkins’ experiments were followed by the naming by Polish biochemist Casimir Funk in 1912. “Vitamine” — “vital amine.” Later, it became clear that not all of these substances were amines, and the last “e” was dropped, becoming vitamin.

In the following 25 years, each vitamin was chemically isolated and named. B1, C, D, A, K, E... This is the list we see on multivitamin bottles today. The first two items on this list were beriberi (B1) and growth retardation (A), and these were the exact correspondences of this year’s Nobel Prize.

The Meaning of the Delayed Award

Eijkman’s initial discovery was in 1897, and Hopkins’ experiment was in 1912. The Nobel Prize was awarded in 1929. This was a delay of 32 years and 17 years, respectively. Why was it so late?

At the time, the Nobel Committee had been considering these two discoveries for a long time. They wanted to determine whether the deficiency concept was truly valid, whether there were other alternative explanations, and whether the discovery would last. It was only after 25 years of verification that the award was given. This careful verification process is what gives the award its weight.

This prudence is the principle of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine today: the award is given not immediately after the discovery, but after it has stood the test of time. The 30-year delay is not strange; it is the verification period that builds the credibility of the award.

Why It’s Important

The Nobel Prize awarded to Eijkman and Hopkins remains relevant today on three levels.

Scientific Level: With the confirmation of the vitamin concept, 20th-century nutrition was born. Today’s recommended dietary allowances (RDAs), food fortification policies (vitamin D fortification in milk, folic acid fortification in flour), and vitamin prescriptions for pregnant women — all of these have their roots in the 1929 Nobel Prize.

Public Health Level: Beriberi, scurvy, rickets — these diseases have almost disappeared in developed countries today, not by chance. After the deficiency paradigm was established, various countries responded with food fortification and dietary policies. This award has, in effect, changed the lives of billions of people.

Diagnostic Framework Level: Today, when we see chronic fatigue, growth retardation, or unexplained neurological symptoms, we always consider “is something missing?” These two men introduced this diagnostic habit into an era when it did not exist.

There is a lesson for us. “If something is wrong, don’t just look at what has come in, but also look at what should have been there in the first place.” This principle applies not only to clinical diagnosis and system debugging, but also to organizational management. If a team is not working well, it is necessary to see not only the new problems but also whether the necessary resources, information, and communication are missing.

Even as you read this sentence, cases of deficiency diseases are being diagnosed in hospitals around the world. The roots of this diagnostic framework are in the chicken coops of Java and the mouse cages of Cambridge 100 years ago.

Summary of the Birth of the Deficiency Concept: In an era dominated by the germ theory, Eijkman demonstrated the existence of “diseases caused by absence” by comparing brown rice and white rice, and Hopkins demonstrated it by comparing purified diets and milk supplements. This deficiency paradigm led to the vitamin concept and became the foundation of 20th-century nutrition and public health.

→ Experience with Coding: DevBench — Missing Dependency Diagnosis → Learn About CS Concepts: DryBench — Deficiency Errors and Dependency Logs