Elmer Verner Mccollum's Life And Accomplishments

Elmer Verner McCollum was born in 1879. He was raised in Kansas, attended Kansas University, and was one of the few nutritional biochemists of that time. He first was studying medicine, but, found that chemistry was a better choice for him. While at Kansas University, McCollum achieved his masters degree, he then got accepted into the Ph.D program at the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale. McCollum was able to complete his Ph.D work in two years. He decided to stay and work on problems of plant protein consumption and diet. He worked on those problems with T. B. Osborne and Lafayette B. Mendel. Doing this work help McCollum’s career, McCollum earned his faculty position at the University of Wisconsin with the help of Mandel. When, McCollum got to Wisconsin he was assigned to work on the

In this project there was a fourth group of animals who were fed all three plants. During the project the group who ate all three did a lot better than the rest of the groups, but, there was no explanation for the difference that was satisfactory. So, McCollum decided that “the most important thing in nutrition was to see what was lacking in such diets.” He started with a colony of wild rats, but, they quickly proved to be not what McCollum needed. He then persuaded the person in charge to get 12 albino rats, which McCollum still needed to buy with his own money. “This colony of rats was the first established in the United States for nutritional studies.” McCollum first gave the idea that the failure in some diets was because they did not taste good. He thought that if they added some flavor additives that the rats would eat more, and in doing so the diets would be more nutritionally sound. However, Mandell and Osborne found fault with this hypothesis, and its supporting data. So, much, so that in some of their papers about it they wrote that McCollum had been careless in some of his experiments. Of, course this caused him some pain since it came