The day vitamin C almost became “ignose”

The text of the episode

Imagine. You have just discovered a molecule that all of humanity needs. It has to be given a name. You think about it, for a long time. And you propose, in all seriousness: “ignose”. Here is the true story of the day vitamin C almost took the most honest name in all of chemistry.

Cambridge, a name rejected

The late 1920s, in Cambridge, England. A Hungarian researcher, Albert Szent-Györgyi, is studying a dizzying question: how do our cells burn their fuel? While digging through beef adrenal glands, two small glands resting on the kidneys, he isolates a curious substance. A sort of acid, a cousin of the sugars. He has no idea what it is for.

So he owns up to it. He calls it “ignose”. “Ignosco”, in Latin, means “I do not know”, and “-ose” is the ending of sugars. The editor of the journal refuses. Szent-Györgyi insists with “godnose”: “God only knows”. Refused again. In the end they settle on a sensible, greyish name: hexuronic acid. He himself would tell the anecdote later, with obvious pleasure.

One problem remains. From beef glands you only get crumbs of this substance. Impossible to get to the bottom of it. In 1931, Szent-Györgyi goes back to Hungary, to Szeged, and teams up with a young researcher who has come from America, Joseph Svirbely. Together they test their acid on guinea pigs, those small animals that, like us, cannot make their own vitamin C.

In 1932, the verdict comes in. Hexuronic acid is the famous anti-scurvy factor. The substance that sailors had been missing for centuries. Vitamin C itself. An American chemist, Charles Glen King, claims the same discovery almost at the same moment: the priority dispute will be long and bitter.

The paprika of Szeged

But large quantities are still needed. And that is where paprika comes in. Szeged is the Hungarian capital of the sweet pepper. The story goes that one evening Szent-Györgyi had no wish at all to eat the peppers served at dinner, and carried them off to the laboratory. The more reliable version is less romantic: with his stock exhausted, he had been testing one fruit after another, one vegetable after another, without success. In the autumn of 1932, he tries paprika.

Jackpot. The red pepper is, in his words, a veritable mine of vitamin C. In one week, the laboratory extracts about a kilo and a half of pure crystals. Szent-Györgyi sends some to colleagues all over the world, among them the English chemist Walter Haworth, who works out its structure.

And the name? In 1933, the two men propose “ascorbic acid”. “A”, meaning without, and “scorbutic”, from scurvy. The acid against scurvy. After “I do not know” and “God only knows”, here at last is a name that tells a story.

One molecule, two Nobel prizes

In 1937, Sweden rewards the two researchers: Szent-Györgyi receives the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Haworth the one in Chemistry. The same autumn. One molecule, two Nobel prizes. A fine revenge for a substance that its discoverer had first christened with his own ignorance.

Today, you come across it everywhere. Your body still cannot make it: it finds it in fresh fruit and vegetables. Vitamin C contributes to the normal function of the immune system and to the reduction of tiredness, and it increases iron absorption. At Herba Barona, in Paris, it is one of the vitamins we are asked about most. Almost nobody knows its first name.

So the next time you read “ascorbic acid” on a label, remember. One editor-in-chief was all that stood between you and reading, in so many words: “I do not know”.