On Tuesday, Sept. 16, 1941, Roger J. Williams, a University of Texas professor, stepped to the podium at a symposium at the University of Chicago and made an announcement with far-reaching implications. As The New York Times printed the following day:
“The discovery of a new member of the ever-growing family of the B vitamins, known collectively as the Vitamin B Complex, was announced here today at the symposium on the biological action of the vitamins at the University of Chicago. The new member has been named ‘folic acid’ because of its abundance in leaves. It is present in all animal tissues and has been found to affect the growth of micro-organisms and yeast… The discovery was made at the University of Texas…”
Today, folic acid, or Vitamin B9, is best known as a critical supplement for pregnant women because it aids in the development of the neural tube early in a fetus’s growth, 28 days after conception. Taking folic acid helps prevent neural tube defects such as spina bifida, caused when the tube doesn’t close. When that happens, the vertebrae that protect the spinal cord don’t form properly and can damage the cord and the nerves from it. Spina bifida can cause difficulty walking, loss of the use of arms and legs, and in the most severe cases, anencephaly, in which half of the brain does not develop.
In 1992, the Centers for Disease Control, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health formally recommended folic acid, and now, more than 1,300 neural tube deficiencies, with all their attendant birth defects, are prevented each year in the United States. Mandatory folic acid fortification is estimated to provide savings of more than $600 million in direct costs annually.
Additionally, folic acid might reduce heart disease, stroke and some types of cancers, and it is good for any cells that rapidly divide, which is why it benefits fingernails, skin and hair.
Roger J. Williams, the principal investigator, had been recruited to UT from Oregon State College and brought his research team with him, including Herschel K. Mitchell. Technician Ernestine Wright also shares credit for the discovery.
The day after the announcement, the Austin American-Statesman reported, “Pres. Homer Price Rainey has repeatedly emphasized the importance of this phase in building a university of national renown. His early declaration for bringing to the university faculty ‘big men’ in educational and scientific fields has borne fruit in the person of youngish, energetic Dr. Roger J. Williams, co-finder with Dr. Esmond E. Snell and Herschel K. Mitchell of folic acid…”
Esmond Snell, who was just beginning his career as an assistant professor, joined Williams’s lab.
Together, the four researchers had brought four tons of spinach into the attic laboratory of the Chemistry Building, the old section of what is now Welch Hall. How much raw spinach does it take to get four tons? Try 80,000 cups. UT historian Jim Nicar recalls being told in a freshman chemistry course that wheelbarrows were used to transport the vegetable. Once they got it into the attic lab, they used a steam kettle and filter press to process the spinach so that they could isolate and identify the compound, which they named after the Latin word for leaf, folium.
Williams earlier had discovered pantothenic acid, the so-called “acid of life,” or Vitamin B5, as well as two of the three coenzyme forms of Vitamin B6 (pyridoxal and pyridoxamine). In isolating two B vitamins, perhaps Williams was trying to best his older brother Robert, chemical director of Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York, who discovered Vitamin B1, thiamin. The brothers were born in India, sons of a missionary.
During the late 1940s, Williams was the dissertation supervisor for a young biochemist named Lorene Rogers, who went on to serve as president of UT from 1974 to 1979. Williams stayed at UT for the remainder of his long career, retiring as professor emeritus at 92 and dying at 94.
Snell left UT in 1945 for a professorship at his alma mater, the University of Wisconsin, and then went to the University of California at Berkeley, where he chaired the Department of Biochemistry. “I consider [Snell] to be one of the top biochemists in the world from the 1940s on,” said the distinguished UT professor Lester Reed upon Snell’s death. “He led the way in using bacteria to study metabolic processes, and that work was some of the best biochemistry and microbiology ever.”
Snell once wrote, “Hard work on interesting problems is enjoyable and preferable to aimless wasting of leisure time. It may also lead to unexpected findings that give insights into important related problems. Such unexpected findings — sometimes called ‘luck’ — frequently happen to the active researcher, but only rarely to those who prefer talk to study and work. So one should study and work hard, on interesting problems of any nature, with the purpose of explaining nature and helping others.”
Mitchell was a doctoral student when he began his research on folic acid under Williams. He was an avid athlete and a self-taught glassblower who made his own laboratory equipment. He left UT for Stanford University in 1943 and spent most of his career at the California Institute of Technology, retiring in 1984.
Though one researcher stayed and two moved on, in their time together on the Forty Acres they made an inestimable contribution to the health of millions around the world.
In 2015, UT’s College of Natural Sciences’ Marc Airhart produced this podcast episode on more recent work related to folic acid by Richard Finnell.
