1. Helen Tracy Parsons was an American biochemist and nutritionist chiefly known for her early work in vitamin B Parsons developed an interest in biochemistry and nutrition at the University of Wisconsin-Madision, where she was a graduate student under Elmer McCollum.
Helen Parsons is well known for her early work on eggs, which was critical to the discovery of biotin and avidin in 1940.
Helen Tracy Parsons was born on March 26,1886, in Arkansas City, Kansas.
Helen Parsons's father was a physician who came from a pioneer family in Indiana and her mother was born at a mission house to Mohegan Native Americans in New England.
At five years old Helen Parsons began attending the second ward school in Arkansas City, where her aunt was the principal.
Helen Parsons moved with her aunt and uncle to Alabama, where she attended a co-ed military high school.
Helen Parsons returned to Arkansas City at age sixteen to teach at a country school.
Helen Parsons described the "enriching [combination] of home economics with science" as "a very potent thing" and switched from wanting to become a Latin teacher to wanting to pursue both home economics and science.
Helen Parsons began pursuing her master's degree under McCollum and received one in 1916 at age 20.
In 1917, McCollum moved to head the biochemistry department at the newly established Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, where Helen Parsons chose to follow.
At Johns Hopkins, Helen Parsons worked with McCollum on many topics pertaining to vitamins, and published her own early study on vitamin C metabolism in rats.
However, Helen Parsons had noticed that humans and other primates required an anti-scurvy, or anti-scorbutic, supplement to their diet while rats did not.
Helen Parsons's thesis involved studying the effect of high protein diets on reproduction and kidney function in rats.
Helen Parsons found that when fed powdered or raw egg white, rats developed dermatitis and neurological dysfunction.
Helen Parsons' graduated with her doctoral degree from Yale in 1928 at the age of 42, after which she returned to the University of Wisconsin-Madison as an associate professor.
Helen Parsons returned to the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1928 as an associate professor with an annual salary of $3600 and research funding from the university for her own laboratory.
Helen Parsons had noticed during her time at Yale that rats fed only raw egg-white as their protein diet developed unfavorable physiological effects such as severe dermatitis and neurological dysfunction.
Helen Parsons hypothesized that there was an 'anti-vitamin' in the egg-white that was abstracting and binding a key nutrient in the rats digestive tract, giving rise to these adverse symptoms.
Helen Parsons recalls being "insulted at the time any of [her] reports" were given at meetings and her results were often called into question by those involved with the industries.
However, after talking with her colleagues, Helen Parsons began to question validity of the cocktails.
Helen Parsons began her own experiments into the matter after receiving funding from a yeast company in Milwaukee to try and prove the nutritional benefits of live yeast.
Helen Parsons began feeding live yeast to human subjects on a diet rich in thiamine and found that live yeast cocktails sharply decreased the amount of urinary thiamine in subjects.
Helen Parsons' found that live yeast recovered from subjects' feces had large amounts of stored thiamine, indicating that thiamine depletion was caused by a withholding process by the viable yeast and not from destruction within the digestive system.
Some of her colleagues were not as fortunate - in her oral history Helen Parsons recalls some of their research being suppressed by the larger yeast companies and their papers cancelled for publication.
Helen Parsons's research sparked a fierce debate over nutrition and yeast, culminating in a threatened lawsuit by the FDA against the yeast companies and the banning of advertisements for yeast cocktails.
Helen Parsons retired from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1956 at the age of 70.
Helen Parsons remained active in the American Institute of Nutrition, the American Society of Biological Chemists, the American Dietetics Association, and the American Home Economics Association.
Helen Parsons was 1 of 112 charter members of the American Institute of Nutrition, which was the first scientific society dedicated solely to the discipline of nutrition and in 1959, was one of three women to be named a fellow of the society.
Helen Parsons was an avid gardener and during her retirement, became a member of many community gardening clubs.
Helen Parsons died on December 30,1977, at her home in Madison, Wisconsin at the age of 91.