WILLIAMS, ROBERT RUNNELS

(b Nellore, India, 16 February 1886; d Summit, New jersey, 2 October 1965)

chemistry, nutrition.

Williams was the son of Robert Runnels Williams, a Baptist missionary, and Alice Evelyn Mills. He was educated at Ottawa University in Kansas and the University of Chicago, receiving the B.S. from Chicago in 1907 and the M.S, in 1908. An honorary D.Sc. was conferred on him by Ottawa University in 1935; six other universities so honored him later. In 1909 he became a chemist with the Bureau of Science in Manila, where he undertook a search for the substance in rice polishings that was a curative for beriberi. The search, identification, and medical use of the substance became the major objective of his entire career.

By the time he returned to the United States in 1914, to take a position with the Bureau of Chemistry of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Williams had established that the active substance was a nitrogenous base. When the United States entered World War I, he was briefly involved with chemical warfare investigations and was later to work for the Bureau of Aircraft Production. After the war he left government service, because the low salary made it difficult to support his wife and four children.

Williams worked briefly in 1919 for the Melcho Chemical Company of Bayonne, New Jersey, developing a process for recovering chemicals from petroleum refinery gases. Between 1919 and 1925 he did research on submarine insulating materials for the Western Electric Company, and in 1925 he became director of the chemistry laboratories at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, a position he held until 1946.

During the 1920’s and 1930’s Williams pursued his research on the anti-beriberi factor (ultimately named vitamin B₁) in his spare time. Working at night in a laboratory in his garage, he slowly improved the concentration of his products. In the meantime, B.C.P. Jansen and W.F. Donath obtained the pure substance in very low yield (1926). In 1927 Williams secured research support from the Carnegie Corporation and was given laboratory space at Columbia University. By 1933 he and his co-workers had obtained pure crystals of vitamin B₁. By using quinine for the elution of the vitamin from fuller’s earth, he developed a procedure that gave better yields than those obtained by other workers in the field.

Once the pure compound was available, Williams found that sulfurous acid cleavage gave a pyrimidine and a thiazole fraction. These were identified, and in 1935 a tentative formula for the structure was published; soon thereafter the compound, named thiamine, was synthesized. Commercial synthesis soon followed.

In 1933 Williams had severed his connections with the Carnegie Corporation as a result of a disagreement regarding patent policy. He subsequently assigned his patents to Research Corporation, a foundation set up by Frederick Cottrell in 1912 to develop scientific patents and use the proceeds for further research. In 1946 Williams became director of grants for Research Corporation, and in 1951 he was made director. Personal profits from Williams’ patents were set aside in the Williams-Waterman Fund for the Combat of Dietary Disease, the income being used to support nutritional research and field programs to combat malnutrition.

In 1940 Williams became chairman of the Cereal Committee of the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Research Council. As a wartime measure he promoted the enrichment of flour and bread with thiamine, other vitamins, iron, and calcium.

Williams’ younger brother, Roger John (b. 1893)discovered pantothenic acid and did extensive nutritional research, especially on the vitamin B complex. The brothers were jointly honored by receipt of the Charles Frederick Chandler Medal of Columbia University in 1942.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Toward the Conquest of Beriberi (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), although a historical account of the study of the disease and the vitamin preventing it, is somewhat autobiographical because Williams was deeply involved in the isolation and synthesis of thiamine. As autobiography, however, it is limited almost entirely to his vitamin research and the use of the synthetic product in controlling the disease, especially in the Philippines; there is very little other personal history. The story of the patents and the use of the income therefrom is treated in The Williams-Waterman Fund for the Combat of Dietary Diseases: A History of the Period 1935 Through 1955 (New York, 1956). Williams was coauthor with Tom D. Spies of Vitamin B₁(Thiamine) and Its Use in Medicine (New York, 1938). The program on flour enrichment is described in “Enrichment of Flour and Bread. A History of the Movement,” Bulletin of the National Research Council, no. 110 (1944), written with R.M. Wilder. The research on the isolation, proof of structure, and synthesis of thiamine was published mostly in Journal of the American Chemical Society. Particularly significant are “Larger yields of Crystalline Antineuritic Vitamin,” in Journal of the American Chemical Society,56 (1934), 1187–1191, written with R.E. Waterman and J.C. Keresztesy; “Structure of Vitamin B₁” ibid.,57 (1935), 229–230, and 58 (1936), 1063–1064; “Studies of Crystalline Vitamin B₁ III. Cleavage of the Vitamin With Sulfite,” ibid., 536–537, written with R.E. Waterman, J.C. Keresztesy, and E.R. Buchman; “Studies . . . B₁. VIII. Sulfite Cleavage. Chemistry of the Acidic Product,” ibid., 1093–1095, written with E.R. Buchman and A.E. Ruehle; and “Studies . . . B₁. XI. Sulfite Cleavage. Chemistry of the Basic Part,” ibid., 1849–1851, written with E.R. Buchman and J. C. Keresztesy.

II. Secondary Literature. The only significant short biography of Williams appears in National Cyclopaediaof American Biography, current vol. F (1942), 204–205. Also see McGraw-Hill Modern Men of Science, I (New York, 1966), 537.

Aaron J. Ihde