RARE \"Vitamin B6\" Roger J. Williams Hand Signed 3X5 Card for Sale

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RARE \"Vitamin B6\" Roger J. Williams Hand Signed 3X5 Card For Sale

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RARE \"Vitamin B6\" Roger J. Williams Hand Signed 3X5 Card:
$349.99

Up for sale a RARE! "Vitamin B6" Roger J. Williams Hand Signed 3X5 Card.

ES-6544E

Roger

John Williams (August 14,

1893 – February 20, 1988), was an American biochemist. He is known for is work on vitamins and human

nutrition. He had leading roles in the discovery of folic acid, pantothenic acid, vitamin B6, lipoic acid, and avidin. He was elected to the National Academy of

Sciences in 1946, and served as the president of the American Chemical Society in

1957. In his later career he spent time writing for a

popular audience on the importance of nutrition. Roger John Williams was born in Ootacamund, India of American parents on August

14, 1893. His family returned to the US when he was two years old, and he grew

up in Kansas and California. He attributed his early interest in chemistry to

the influence of his brother Robert R. Williams, eight

years his senior, who was also a chemist. Robert is remembered for being the

first to synthesize thiamine (vitamin B1). Roger was an

undergraduate at the University of Redlands and

received his bachelor's degree in 1914. He received a teaching certificate from

the University of California,

Berkeley the following year and began work as a science teacher

in California. After a year of teaching, he decided to return to school and

began graduate work at the University of Chicago,

from which he received his Ph.D. in 1919. His Ph.D Thesis was entitled The

Vitamine Requirements of Yeasts. Julius Stieglitz was the chairman of the department of

chemistry at U Chicago when Roger Williams was a student there, and Williams

later described Stieglitz as a major influence upon him in organic chemistry. Williams began his academic research career

by joining the faculty at the University of Oregon in

1920. During the following twelve years he spent there, he discovered pantothenic acid. In 1932 he moved to Oregon State College and

in 1939 he moved again to the University of Texas at

Austin. He founded and became the founding director of the

Biochemical Institute (later the Clayton Foundation Biochemical Institute) in

1940 with funding from Benjamin Clayton. Williams'

research program was notable in that he used yeast as model organisms to study nutritional requirements, on the

hypothesis that the underlying cellular biochemistry was generalizable from

yeast to animals. He aimed to study vitamins, at the time known as animal nutrients whose chemical

properties were not characterized. This approach was successful in leading to

the discovery of pantothenic acid, published in 1933, which prompted renewed

interest among biochemists in microbial metabolism. Williams and his colleagues

in Texas – including Robert Eakin, Esmond Snell, William

Shive, and Lester Reed –

continued this work and used the technique to discover a number of other

vitamins and nutrients. Williams and Snell, along with student Herschel K. Mitchell,

isolated and named folic acid by

extracting it from four tons of processed spinach. He also worked on discovering and isolating vitamin B6, lipoic acid, and avidin. Throughout his career Williams was a

prolific writer, producing not only hundreds of scientific papers but also a

number of widely used textbooks. Williams retired from his role at the director

of the Biochemical Institute in 1963 and from the University of Texas in 1986.