Harry Steenbock (1886-1967) --a biographical sketch
Schneider, H.A.; Steenbock, H.
Journal of Nutrition 103(9): 1233-1247
1973
ISSN/ISBN: 0022-3166 PMID: 4579907 Document Number: 2857
Harry Steenbock, like most men of genius, was a complicated human being. These puzzling complexities of human beings are at once the biographer's delight and despair. But the delighted and despairing biographer, like the portrait painter, must finally selectively choose a suitable mode of presenting his subject. For the portrait painter this choice can range from the many, simultaneously-seen facets grasped by a Picasso, to the single-minded, strong, but far-from-simple visage of an Italian Renaissance prince or merchant set forth by an Antonello da Messina. In this memoir, set in the pages of a scholarly journal devoted to the science that was Harry Steenbock's life blood, the choice is suggested by both the man and our aims. The Harry Steenbock with whom we are concerned here is that public part of him which led, influenced and marked the science of nutrition so that, when he departed it, the field was permanently changed and the rivers of thought now flowed in the scientific landscape through channels quite new and ever-deepening. Like Antonello's 15th century merchants who look out at us as masters of their world, so, like that moment in time immobilized by the portraitist, did Harry Steenbock master his time and world for a moment of supreme significance. The time was November, 1923, and what made Harry Steenbock its master was his demonstration in the rat colony of the Department of Agricultural Chemistry of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, that the antirachitic and growth-promoting effect conferred directly through irradiation of an experimental animal by a quartz mercury vapor lamp, could be conveyed indirectly by irradiating, not the animal, but the food that the animal subsequently ate.
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