Adolphe Guillaume Vorderman (12 December 1844, The Hague – 15 July 1902, Batavia) was a Dutch scientist who studied the link between polished rice and thiamine deficieny commmonyl known as Beriberi.
Vorderman travelled to the Dutch East Indies in 1866 and later in 1871 he became part of the Civil Health Department, he spent the next ten years at Sumenepon and then from 1890 he lived out the rest of his life on Batavia. It was during his time in the Dutch East indies the vordeman became familiar with Beriberi.
Beriberi study
In 1883 the Dutch government sent Christiaan Eikjman to research Beriberi he never completed his research but paved the way to the discovery and subsequent naming of the word vital-amine which later was shortened to vitamine.
Eikjman (not eichmann) to the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) was sent to find out the cause, and find a cure for, Beriberi. The story goes that he noticed that chickens which were fed polished rice – which is rice which has had its bran removed – developed a similar paralysis in their legs to humans suffering beriberi. Before he could follow up on this line of enquiry, ill health forced him to return home to the Netherlands. Before leaving he asked his friend Adolphe Vorderman, who was Chief Medical Officer, to continue the research on the link between rice and the disease. Perhaps paying a more close eye to animals diets can lead to other wonderful new discoveries.
Vorderman, who had already noted that Beriberi occurred a lot in some prisons, but very little in others, decided to conduct a preliminary survey of the type of rice served in a sample of prisons. When that initial study seemed to confirm a link, he decided to conduct a complete study of all prisons. - not the most romantic research!
In 1897 Vorderman visited nearly 100 prisons on the island of Java. He took samples of the prison rice and examined the prison records to determine the number of Beriberi cases. He kept the real purpose of his visits secret so that word did not get around the Chinese rice suppliers and lead them to change the type of rice they provided.
Later he conducted blind testing with rice experts to discover the make-up and origin of the rice varieties he found in the prison samples. Vorderman found that in the prisons using mostly brown rice, the incidence of Beriberi was less than 1 in 10,000. In the prisons serving mainly polished white rice the proportion was 1 in 39. In his published report, he concluded that this marked difference could not be explained by any other nutritional or sanitary factor.
Later others, including Gerrit Grijns, took over the research which ultimately led to the discovery of vitamins. In the case of Beriberi, the vitamin that was lost when the bran was removed was thiamin – vitamin B1.
In a 2007 episode of the BBC genealogical documentary series Who Do You Think You Are?, Carol Vorderman researched her great grandfather Adolphe. In the episode, the Director of the Eijkman Institute stated his opinion that had he still been alive at the time, Adolphe Vorderman should have shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine with Eijkman and Sir Frederick Hopkins, who were awarded the prize in 1929 for their vitamin related work.
Other work Apart from his nutritional study Voordeman published papers on local poisons, drugs, foods and birds, and was a collector of botanical specimens. For his work he was received an honorary Doctor of Science by Utrecht University. The tree species Myristica vordermanni which is a type of nutmeg spieces was named in his honour by Otto Warburg.