Funk, Casimir

Funk, Casimir

(b. Warsaw, Poland [then Russia], 23 February 1884; d. New York, N.Y., 20 November 1967)

biochemsitry.

Funk was the son of Jacques and Gustawa Zysan Funk. His father was a prominent dermatologist. In 1904 he received the Ph.D. in organic chemistry at the University of Bern, where he worked on the synthesis of stilbestrols. Following work at the Pasteur Institute, the Wiesbaden Municipal Hospital, and the University of Berlin, where he was an assistant to Emil Abderhalden, he took a post at the Lister Institute in London, where he was soon assigned to work on beriberi. In 1914 he married Denise Schneidesch of Brussels, by whom he had two children. In 1915 the Funks immigrated to New York, where he held several industrial and university positions. In 1920 he became a U.S. citizen. In 1923 the Rockefeller Foundation supported his return to Warsaw as chief of the biochemistry department in the State Institute of Hygiene, a post which he abandoned in 1927 because of political conditions in Poland. In Paris, from 1928 to 1939, Funk was consultant to a pharmaceutical firm and founder of the Casa Biochemica, a privately financed research institute. This was abandoned in the face of the German invasion, and Funk returned to New York as consultant to the U.S. Vitamin Corporation. From 1940 he was president of the Funk Foundation for Medical Research.

At the Lister Institute, Funk prepared a pyrimidine-related concentrate of rice polishings which was curative for beriberi in pigeons. In 1912 he proposed the term “vitamine” (for vital amine) for organic compounds responsible in trace amounts for the cure or prevention of beriberi, scurvy, rickets, and pellagra. His concentrates were primarily nicotinic acid (noneffective for beriberi but later shown by Elvehjem to be curative for pellagra) contaminated with the anti-beriberi vitamin. Besides his work on vitamins, Funk conducted extensive studies on animal hormones, particularly the male sex hormone, and on the biochemistry of cancer, ulcers, and diabetes. He theorized freely and saw close relationships between trace nutrients (vitamins and minerals), hormones, and enzymes. A number of substances developed in his laboratories were sold commercially in the pharmaceutical industry.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. A comprehensive but incomplete bibliography of Funk’s publications appears in Harrow’s biography (see below). His first paper on the nature of the anti-beriberi substance is “On the Chemical Nature of the Substance Which Cures Polyneuritis in Birds Induced by a Diet of Polished Rice,” in Journal of Physiology, 43 (1911), 395–400. The paper introducing the term “vitamine” is “The Etiology of Deficiency Diseases,” in Journal of State Medicine, 20 (1912), 341–368. Die Aetiologie der Avitaminosen mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der physiologischen Bedeutung der Vitamine (Wiesbaden, 1914) was printed in several German eds. and in an English trans. by H. E. Dubin as The Vitamins (Baltimore, 1922). See also his L’histoire de la découverte des vitamines (Paris, 1924).

II. Secondary Literature. A popularized biography is Benjamin Harrow, Casimir Funk, Pioneer in Vitamins and Hormones (New York, 1955). An anonymous sketch of his life appeared in Current Biography, 6 (1945), 22–24; and an obituary notice appeared in the New York Times (21 Nov. 1967).

Aaron J. Ihde