demonstration that they contained a substance which could be reduced to
crystalline form and was therefore worthy of being considered a chemical
substance. In 1911, before Fraser and Stanton or any other workers had
been able to show to what their curative extracts were due, Funk produced
his product, demonstrated its properties and claimed his right to naming
the same. At that he barely escaped priority from still another source.
The chemists in Japan were naturally interested in this problem and
possessed an able worker by the name of Suzuki. Suzuki and his co-workers
Odake and Shimamura were engaged in the same fractioning processes with
polishings and entirely independently of Funk or other workers they too
succeeded in isolating a curative substance and published their discovery
the same year as Funk, 1911. Their methods were later shown to be
identical up to a certain point. Suzuki called his product "Oryzanin."
Funk's elementary analyses had shown the presence of nitrogen in this
product and his method of extraction indicated that this nitrogen was
present in basic form. For that reason he suggested that his product
belonged to a class of substances which chemists call "amines." Since its
absence meant death and its presence life what more natural than to call
it the Life-amine or Vita-amine. This is the origin of Funk's
nomenclature.

Both Funk's original crystals and Suzuki's oryzanin were later shown to be
complexes of the curative substances combined with adulterants and we do
not yet know just what a vitamine is or whether it is an amine at all but
no one since 1911 has been able to get any nearer to the identification
than Funk and while he has added much data to his earlier studies he has
himself not yet given us the pure vitamine. For that reason it has been
suggested by various people that the name vitamine should not be used
since it has no sufficient evidence to support it. Hopkins of England had
suggested the name "accessory food factors." E. V. McCollum holds that we