Flying a kite in the rain one night in 1752, Ben Franklin demonstrated that lightning could be directed. But despite the old saying that emerged from the famous experiment, he never captured anything in a bottle. It was a Wisconsin biochemist named Harry Steenbock who literalized the phrase by distilling and capping something as elemental as the thunderbolt: sunlight.
Steenbock’s discovery occurred during a 1923 investigation into the causes of rickets, a bone disease associated with vitamin D deficiency. He observed that rats deprived of sunlight and the necessary vitamins routinely developed the condition, but rats similarly deprived in one particular cage in his lab never did. While attempting to isolate the cause, Steenbock tested a coating of sawdust in the cage of the healthy rats. It turned out to be rich in vitamin D; the rats had been eating it. He then traced the source of the vitamin D to light emanating from the laboratory’s new quartz-vapor lamp: its ultraviolet rays had produced significant amounts of the “sunshine vitamin” crucial to human health.
The discovery secured Steenbock’s place in medical history, but there is every reason to believe the young professor’s mind was on other things: namely table butter and the challenge it faced from an upstart oleomargarine industry. His loyalty to butter and his determination to block the infusion of its artificial rivals with vitamin D would accelerate the emergence of a post-taboo world of academic-industry partnerships and university patenting.
Steenbock grew up on a family dairy farm in eastern Wisconsin and earned all of his degrees at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. In 1908, he was hired by the university’s department of agricultural chemistry to tackle the problems of the state dairy industry that funded most of its work. Steenbock, ever the Wisconsin farm boy, saw himself as working for the industry that raised him and provided a living for nearly everyone he knew and loved. His discovery put him in a position to keep vitamin D out of the enemy hands of the oleomargarine industry. The new butter substitutes were cheaper than real butter, but they lacked vitamins, severely limiting their appeal. The weight of responsibility to keep it this way fell heavy on Steenbock. Several years earlier, he’d developed a method for producing a concentrated form of vitamin A. When he failed to secure a process patent, the margarine industry pounced and used its enhanced product, now rich with vitamin A, to cut into butter’s nutritional and market dominance.