Christiaan Eijkman

A Dutch physician working in the Dutch East Indies who noticed that laboratory chickens fed polished, leftover military-ration rice developed the paralysis-like symptoms of beriberi, and that the birds recovered within days once a change of cook restored their diet to unpolished rice. He traced the effect to a substance present in rice husks and absent from polished rice, ruling out infection as the cause, work that by 1897 identified what would later be recognized as a deficiency of vitamin B1, thiamine. He shared the 1929 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Frederick Gowland Hopkins.