RARE "Vitamin B6" Esmond Snell Hand Signed Album Page For Sale

Up for sale a RARE! "Vitamin B6" Esmond Snell Hand Signed Album Page. 

1914 – December 9, 2003) was an American biochemist who spent his career of bacteria and yeast.

He is well known for his study of lactic acid-producing bacteria, developing microbiological

assays for a number of key nutrients; the discovery of more than half

of known vitamins has been attributed to the use of this work. He discovered

several B vitamins, including folic acid, and characterized the biochemistry of vitamin B6 (also known as pyrixodal).

The fourth of five children, Snell was born in 1914 in Salt Lake City, Utah to

parents who met while serving as Mormon missionaries. The

family moved several times in Wyoming and Utah before settling in Provo, Utah so that the children could attend Brigham Young University.

Snell became interested in chemistry during high school and went on to study

chemistry at BYU; he also – "reluctantly", as he remembered later –

studied secondary education as "insurance" against the unemployment

of the Great Depression. After graduation, he received a scholarship to

continue his studies at the University of

Wisconsin–Madison, where he joined the research group of William

Harold Peterson and began his long career studying nutrition

and metabolism in microorganisms. Snell received his Ph.D. in

biochemistry in 1938 and moved to the University of Texas at

Austin, where he worked as a postdoctoral fellow with Roger J. Williams.  Snell began his independent research career

with an appointment as an assistant professor of

chemistry at the University of Texas at Austin in 1941, advancing to associate

professor in 1943. He then moved back to his alma mater in 1945, joining the

biochemistry faculty of the University of Wisconsin and remaining there until

1951, when he returned to Austin to occupy newly constructed laboratory space.

In 1956 he was offered the chairmanship of the biochemistry department at

the University of California,

Berkeley, and relocated his laboratory there. He served as chair

until 1956 and remained in the department until 1976, departing briefly

for sabbatical visits to Feodor Lynen's research group in Munich, Germany and later to Osaka University in 1971. After 20 years at Berkeley,

Snell again returned to Austin for family reasons and became the chair of the

microbiology department there for the following four years. Snell became

the Ashbel Smith Professor

of Chemistry in 1980 and retired, assuming professor emeritus status,

in 1990. During his career Snell served on a number of scientific journal editorial

boards, most notably as the editor of the Annual Review of

Biochemistry from 1968 to 1983 and of Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications from

1970 to 1985. Snell is widely recognized as one of the foremost nutritional

biochemists of the 20th century. His early work developing microbiological

assays for key nutrients has been credited with facilitating the discovery of

at least half of known vitamins due to their ease of use compared to more

traditional animal studies. His 1939 publication describing a

microbiological assay for riboflavin – then one of just two B vitamins known – is considered the first widely used

such assay. His notable discoveries using these methods include the

discovery and naming of folic acid, which Herschel K. Mitchell,

Snell, and Roger J. Williams isolated

from four tons of processed spinach and demonstrated to be

a growth factor for the

experimental organism Streptococcus faecalis. A

version of Snell's microbiological assay method based on the casei (now

known as Lactobacillus rhamnosus) is still used as a method for

detecting folates in blood. Snell's interest in isolating and characterizing

unknown nutrients and growth factors also led to the serendipitous discovery of

useful biochemical tools. While working to characterize the yeast growth factor

that would become known as biotin, Snell and coworkers discovered the

egg white protein avidin, which binds biotin with extremely

high affinity. At the time avidin was noted as a cause of "egg white

injury", a form of biotin deficiency in animals. The rarity and expense of obtaining biotin at

the time limited further investigations, but the extremely high avidin-biotin

binding affinity was later exploited and is now widely used in molecular biology for purification and molecular

detection applications. Snell is perhaps best known for his work

on vitamin B6; he and Soviet scientist Alexander E. Braunstein have

been cited as the "fathers of vitamin B6". Snell discovered two novel

forms of the substance – pyridoxal and pyridoxamine – and thus elaborated the underlying

biochemistry of enzymes that rely on In a series of experiments beginning in the 1940s and later

conducted with student David Metzler, a general mechanism for the catalytic cycle of

pyridoxal-dependent enzymes was discovered. Recalling his own work with

pyridoxal, French biophysicist Michel E. Goldberg described

Snell as "the pope of pyridoxal catalysis