Biographical Memoirs Volume 91 (2009) / Chapter Skim
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ROGER JOHN WILLIAMS
ROGER JOHN WILLIAMS
Pages 318-331
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From page 319... ...
williams was a noted organic chemist who became an internationally acclaimed biochemist and a pioneer in the study of vitamins, promoting the importance of nutrition and the concept of biochemical individuality. Roger and his students and collaborators discovered or characterized the B vitamins pantothenic acid, folic acid, pyridoxal and pyridoxamine (forms of vitamin B6)
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After a brief stop in Oakland, California, his father acquired an 800 acre ranch in Greenwood County, Kansas, about 12 miles outside Eureka. At four years of age Roger attended a one-room country school about 2 miles from their home.
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He learned to bud deciduous fruit trees; two thousand young trees per 10-hour day to earn one dollar. However, at the last minute a teaching job opened up at Hollister, California.
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His undergraduate studies in organic chemistry left him discouraged about his potential as a chemist. He would later say that Stieglitz "lifted organic chemistry out of the hopeless state (for me)
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VITAMINS AND NUTRITION In his early research work at the University of Chicago, University of Oregon, and Oregon State University, Roger developed the methodology for the quantitative determinations of chemicals essential for the growth of yeast. Of greater importance was his concept of the universality of the basic biochemistry of all living organisms.
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From page 324... ...
This persistence led to his discovery of the yeast growth factor, pantothenic acid, which he announced in 1933, and led to the subsequent acceptance of this compound as an essential cog in the biochemical machinery of all cells and as a vitamin for many species. The consequence of this work, and related work of one other laboratory, was that microbial systems attained a leading role in the discovery of new nutritional factors as well as in the development of biochemical genetics and intermediary metabolism.
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, American Society of Biological Chemists, American Institute of Nutrition, Biochemical Society of London, American Association for Cancer Research, American Association for the Advancement of Science (fellow) , Society of Experimental Biology and Medicine, and American Association of Clinical Chemists.
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Later work in this area demonstrated the broad role of inborn differences in creating unique biochemical individuality. In several books he stressed that these inborn individual differences are widespread, of varying magnitude, and are crucial to the understanding and solving of most human problems: The Human Frontier, 1946; Free and Unequal, 1953; Biochemical Individuality, 1956; You Are Extraordinary, 1967; and Rethinking Education: The Coming Age of Enlightenment, 1986.
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His ideas helped inspire the founding in 1975 of a medical clinic in Wichita, Kansas -- Center for the Improvement of Human Functioning International -- where all new patients receive a copy of The Wonderful World Within You. His basic idea was that human differences (differences between individual human beings)
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He felt that medicine had been inordinately concerned with how "the human body" functions, and had paid very little attention to the striking genetic and individual metabolic pattern differences. Roger, in summing up his scientific work, recognized that it was of a diverse nature and called himself one of those specialists who specialize in having broad interests.
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110:589-597. 1937 Organic oxidation equivalent analysis.
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The concentration and assay of avidin, the injury-producing protein in raw egg white.
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1956 Biochemical Individuality: The Basis for the Genetotrophic Concept. New York: Wiley & Sons.
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