Christiaan Eijkman

Christiaan Eijkman was born 11 August 1858 in the Netherlands and trained as a physician before turning to physiology. His work on beriberi, then a mysterious and often fatal disease, showed that diet — specifically, a deficiency — was the cause, a revelation that upended assumptions about illness. The demonstration led directly to the identification of antineuritic vitamins, what we now call thiamine. In 1929 he shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Sir Frederick Hopkins for the discovery of vitamins. He died 5 November 1930.