2301 Monticello Rd
Baltimore, MD, USA

National Register of Historic Places - Elmer V. McCollum House

Statement of Significant:

Elmer V. McCollum was born near Fort Scott, Kansas, on March 3, 1879. After attending local schools, he entered the University of Kansas in 1899 and graduated in 1903. McCollum remained at Kansas for his M.A. and then continued his graduate study at Yale, where he earned his Ph.D. in chemistry in 1906. During his years in graduate school McCollum was an outstanding student and early developed an interest in research. Upon receiving his Ph.D., he accepted an offer from the University of Wisconsin's Agricultural Experimental Station to become an instructor in agricultural chemistry.

By the beginning of the 20th century the State agricultural experimental stations had assumed an important role in American scientific research. Under the direction of William A. Henry the Wisconsin station had become the country's finest agricultural experimental organization and it served as a model for other such institutions. Although the major focus of attention at the State agricultural experimental stations was to increase the productivity of American agriculture, the stations also conducted significant pure science research especially in the areas of bacteriology, biochemistry, and genetics. When in 1907 McCollum joined the faculty at the Wisconsin station, he became affiliated with an institution with an established research tradition. McCollum worked at the Wisconsin Agricultural Experimental Station from 1907 to 1917. By 1917 he had become a full professor and it was during these years that he began the research for which he is best known.

In 1917 William H. Welch at Johns Hopkins was busy putting together a faculty for the university's new school of Hygiene and Public Health. As was Welch's custom he hoped to attract to the school gifted researchers and teachers from across the country. Knowing of McCollum's work in nutrition, and recognizing the important link between nutrition and public health, Welch invited McCollum to join the faculty of the new school. McCollum accepted and moved to Baltimore. Johns Hopkins became his academic home from 1917 until his retirement in 1946. The title of professor emeritus did not mean an end to McCollum's scientific interests. In addition to continuing his interest in research, McCollum in his later years turned to writing on the history of the study of nutrition. He remained active until almost the end of a long life, dying in November 15, 1967, at the age of 88.

When Elmer V. McCollum began his career in research in 1907 at the Wisconsin Agricultural Experimental Station, researchers in this country and in Europe had already recognized that naturally occurring diseases can be caused by the absence of something in the diets of humans and animals. 1897 Ehristiann Eijkman, a Dutch army surgeon who worked in Indonesia, discovered that he could cause berberi in chickens by feeding them a diet of polished rice similar to the diet of many Indonesians. Eijkman next demonstrated that the disease could be cured by including the rice polishings in the diet. He correctly concluded that there must be some- thing in the rice polishings that the body required and without which it would develop berberi. At Wisconsin beginning in 1907 McCollum began research in the field of diet and nutrition. Using rats as his experimental animals McCollum fed various test groups carefully controlled diets. After a number of years McCollum was able to induce diet deficiency diseases such as alteration in the growth of bones and the inability of the eyes to adjust to dim light in the rats. After further lengthy experimentation he isolated a fat-soluble alcohol which when removed from the diet was responsible for the disorders. In 1913 McCollum announced his discovery and the fat-soluble alcohol was designated vitamin A. (In the same year Yale's Thomas Osborne and Lafayette Mendel made a similar discovery.)

The discovery of vitamin A was an important step on the road to the investigation of vitamins and the role they play in the body's chemistry. Eventually a host of known diseases such as scurvy, rickets, pernicious anemia, and pellagra were traced to vitamin deficiencies. Later vitamins would be chemically explained and synthetically produced (resulting in a huge vitamin industry and in the case of some vitamins a cult.)

After moving to Johns Hopkins in 1917 as a professor of biochemistry, McCollum continued his research on vitamins. In 1922 employing the same animal assay approach he had used at Wisconsin, McCollum identified vitamin D as a prime dietary requirement for the prevention of rickets. He was also responsible for an early identification of vitamin B, although later research indicated that a host of water soluable vitamins belong to what is today called the B complex group (among them B1, B2, B6, and B12). While at Johns Hopkins McCollum also performed important work in the field of trace minerals, another important factor in body chemistry. McCollum's expertise in vitamins in particular and nutrition in general led to his appointment to several public bodies concerned with questions of diet and health. In 1931 he served as an American member of the International Committee on Vitamin Standards of the League of Nations. The committee was responsible for drawing up standardized vitamin units and determine the quantities necessary for good health. From 1928 to 1937 McCollum served as an advisor to the Department of Agriculture and during World War II he helped formulate guidelines for sound dietary practices in the armed forces.

McCollum received several awards, among them the American Institute of Nutrition's Osborne and Mendel Award (1955) and the Borden Award in Nutrition (1958). In 1965 a McCollum Award was established in his honor by the American Society of Clinical Nutrition. He belonged to several honorary societies and organizations and served as the president of the American Society of Biology Chemists from 1927 to 1929. McCollum authored numerous papers and books. Among his titles were: Text Book of Organic Chemistry for Medical Students (1916), The New Knowledge of Nutrition (1918), and The American Home Diet (1919). In 1957 he published a highly regarded history of the study of nutrition called a History of Nutrition. His final work, published in 1965 when McCollum was 85, was an autobiography, From Kansas Farm Boy to Scientist.

The career of Elmer V. McCollum and his work in the discovery of vitamins illustrates a major direction of medical research in America during the first decades of this century. Employing experimental methods such as McCollum's use of rats to identify vitamin deficiency diseases, researchers launched a systematic and highly specialized attack on disease in general. Diseases caused by bacteria, viruses, vitamin deficiencies, endocrine disorders, and the like were identified and, in many cases, cured. The successes of the biochemists, nutritionists, pathologists, and their colleagues across the discipline spectrum led to a very significant decrease in mortality rates and a significant increase in life expectancy (which in turn allowed medical research to direct its attention to the degenerative diseases such as heart disease and cancer). Elmer V. McCollum in his work. on vitamins contributed to curing diseases such as night blindness (lack of vitamin A) and rickets (vitamin D deficiency) and his accomplishments in nutrition in general marked a significant improvement in human health.