George R. Minot
Facts
Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive.
George Richards Minot
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1934
Born: 2 December 1885, Boston, MA, USA
Died: 25 February 1950, Brookline, MA, USA
Affiliation at the time of the award: Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
Prize motivation: “for their discoveries concerning liver therapy in cases of anaemia”
Prize share: 1/3
Work
Anemia, or blood deficiency, means that the amount of red blood cells in the blood is too low. After George Whipple showed that the formation of blood cells among dogs was stimulated by a diet rich in liver, in 1926 George Minot and William Murphy adapted this finding for people with the serious illness of pernicious anemia. If patients ate abundant amounts of liver daily, their condition improved. This also shed light on the cause of pernicious anemia, a shortage of a substance that later proved to be vitamin B12, which is found in liver.
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