Did you have a glass of OJ this morning? Maybe you popped a vitamin C pill or some Emergen-C to ward off a cold. But how do we know about the restorative powers of vitamin C? Today's Google doodle might offer some insight.
Google's Friday homepage doodle is celebrating the 118th birthday of Albert von Szent-Györgyi, a Nobel Prize-winning pharmacologist who is credited with discovering vitamin C. As a result, Google's image displays two oranges and other fruit-based sources of vitamin C.
Szent-Györgyi was born in Budapest in 1893 and started studying at the Semmelweis University in 1911 before being called to serve as a medic during World War I. But he soon became disillusioned and "had a burning desire to go back to science and intellectual work," he told the BBC in a 1965 interview. "So one day, in the field, I took my gun and shot through the bone," he said, allowing him to return to the university and his studies.
Szent-Györgyi started his research with anatomy, and dabbled in physiology bacteriology ("hoping to find the secrets of life in those very small, tiny creatures," he told the BBC), molecules and chemistry. But later, he shifted to electrons and quantum mechanics.
"I went through the whole gamut of organization, which was a vain effort so to say, because in the end, I ended with electroncs, which have no life at all," he said. "But I don't think it vain because to understand life, one must understand electrons too."
Szent-Györgyi earned his PhD from Cambridge University in 1927, where he worked to isolate what he then called "hexuronic acid" from adrenal gland tissue. After moving to the University of Szeged in 1930, he and research fellow Joseph Svirbely found that this "hexuronic acid" was really an unidentified antiscorbutic factor known as vitamin C.
As Szent-Györgyi told the BBC, however, it almost had a different name.
"Then I knew very little about chemical structure; I knew only that it was a sugar and we chemists design a sugar only by putting O's on the end," he said. "Ignos means 'I don't know," so I called it Ig Noos, but the editor of the biochemical journal was a very serious gentleman; he didn't like joking, so he refused this paper, so I proposed God Noos, which he liked even less. But after all, he accepted the paper, and today the substance is known as ascorbic acid."
In 1937, Szent-Györgyi earned the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for his discoveries in connection with the biological combustion processes, with special reference to vitamin C and the catalysis of fumaric acid."
He then focused his work on muscle research, "and quickly discovered the proteins actin and myosin and their complex," according to his Nobel biography. "This led to a reproduction of the fundamental reaction of muscle contraction which formed the foundation of muscle research in the following decades."
Szent-Györgyi was active in Hungarian politics, reportedly conducted secret negotiations with the Allies during World War II on behalf of Hungarian prime minister Miklós Kállay. This allegedly prompted Hitler himself to issue a warrant for Szent-Györgyi's arrest, which he avoided. He moved to the United States in 1947 and established the Institute for Muscle Research at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
Later in life, he turned some of his efforts to cancer research, establishing the National Foundation for Cancer Research. He died in 1986.
"I feel very strongly that science has a very strong moral component. I feel very strongly that what science is based on is honesty and an absolute uncompromising honesty and goodwill and collaboration and modesty," he told the BBC. "Because science is built on the human effort of all nations and all people of all colors and creeds, so we cannot just cut them out."
One of the company's more popular doodles was a playable image in honor of musician Les Paul, which eventually got its own standalone site. The search giant also celebrated the year's first total lunar eclipse with a doodle that included a live feed of the event.
Recently, it was revealed that Google obtained a patent for its popular homepage doodles, covering "systems and methods for enticing users to access a Web site."
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