Question

Napoleon’s Buttons– Chapter 2 – Ascorbic Acid

1. What is the structural formula for ascorbic acid? Molecular formula? Identify its functional groups.

2. How were the vitamins named? Is this accurate?

3. Why is ascorbic acid not a vitamin for most creatures? What is missing in the human that makes ascorbic acid a vitamin for us?

4. What was the process by which vitamin C was discovered, isolated, and identified chemically?

Answer 1

2. The naming of vitamins began with simply assigning the next available letter of the English alphabet as the new vitamin was identified. Vitamins A-E were named A-E due to the chronological discovery of the various vitamins. Vitamin K is the odd exception since it was discovered by Germans and was involved in Koagulation and the vitamin was also named as Koagulations vitamin. The letter K has since then stuck.

3. Humans are one of the few mammals unable to manufacture ascorbic acid in their liver. Most other animals, except the ape family and guinea pigs, produce ascorbic acid in the liver from glucose in relatively higher amounts than we receive from today's modern diets.

4. Charles Glen King isolated vitamin C and Norman Haworth deduced the chemical structure of vitamin C in 1933.