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You don’t hear much about the disease beriberi anymore. Part of the reason is that breakfast cereals include a mysterious ingredient called thiamine.
您应该极少听说一种叫做脚气病（beriberi）的顽疾吧。可为何如今患有这种病的人已经不多了呢？其部分原因在于，现代人早餐中的谷类食品含有一种名为硫胺（thiamine）的神秘成分。
Thiamine is the vitamin that started it all.
作为vitamin家族的一个成员，硫胺揭开了整个家族的故事。
Beriberi is an illness that attacks the nervous system and makes people weak and listless. Beriberi literally means “weakness weakness.”
脚气病（beriberi）是一种使人神经系统受损的疾病，其症状为虚弱、倦怠。而单词beriberi在字面上就有“虚弱（weakness）” 的意思。
During the late 1800s the Japanese navy was having a problem with beriberi among its sailors. They cracked the problem when they made the sailors eat brown rice instead of white rice. There was something in that brown rice that seemed to save the day.
在十九世纪末期，日本海军中的水兵就颇受脚气病的困扰。直到水手们将主粮由普通大米改为糙米，这个问题才得到解决。看来，多亏了糙米中的某种物质，日本海军才转危为安。
A Polish biochemist named Casimir Funk isolated what was in the brown stuff. It turned out to be thiamine.
一位名叫卡西米尔•冯克（Casimir Funk）的波兰生化学家，从糙米中分离出了一种被后人命名为硫胺（thiamine）的物质。
As its name implies, thiamine is part of a group of chemicals known as amines. Casimir Funk was rightly excited at the isolation of this life-giving chemical and he joined a chorus of other nutritional scientists predicting that with more research other chemicals could be uncovered and found to be essential to our health. There were likely a bunch of diseases that could be prevented if only we could find out the little bit of stuff we needed to eat that would prevent them.
正如它名称所显示的那样，硫胺属于一种叫做胺（amines）的化学物质。在分离出的这种对生命至关重要的化学物质之后，卡西米尔•冯克十分激动。而随后，他也加入到一群营养学家的行列——这些学者预测，凭借更多更深入的研究，其他对人类健康起到举足轻重作用的化学物质也终将被发现。只要我们找到了针对某一些疾病起作用的化学物质，并按需微量摄入它们，我们就可以预防这些疾病。
In 1912 he coined a new term for these various little bits of stuff: vitamines.
冯克于1912年为这些微量元素造出了一个新名词：vitamines。
He made up the word based on the Latin vita meaning “life” and amine the class of chemicals that thiamine belonged to.
基于意为“生命”的拉丁语单词vita以及硫胺所属的那类化学物质amine（胺），冯克造出了这个新单词。
Casimir Funk was right about there being all kinds of illness that we could prevent with the right vitamins but he was wrong in supposing that just because thiamine was an amine, all the other vitamins were likely to be amines too.
卡西米尔•冯克是对的：只要服用正确的vitamins，我们可以预防很多疾病。不过，他的判断——仅仅由于硫胺是胺的一种，所以其他所有的维生素似乎都是胺——却并不正确。
And so it was that the word was punished by the removal of its “e” so that people wouldn’t ever be fooled again into thinking that a vitamin needed to be an amine.
因此，他创造出的这个单词受到了惩罚，其末尾的“e”被删除。这样一来，人们应该不会再犯傻，认为vitamin必须是一种胺。
Although thiamine was the first vitamin to be called a vitamin it is also known to us as Vitamin B1. You’d think that the first vitamin might be called Vitamin A1 wouldn’t you.
尽管硫胺是第一种被称为vitamin的维生素，它却被人们叫做Vitamin B1。您大概会想，第一种维生素大概会被叫做Vitamin A1，对吧？
Well the reason it’s B1 that as people discovered more of these things that seemed to be so good for us, they began to notice that some of them were soluble in water and others were soluble in fats. A scientist named Elmer McCollum called the fat soluble vitamins A, and the water soluble vitamins B.
其实，它之所以被命名为B1，其原因在于维生素的溶解特性：在发现了更多此类对健康有益的元素之后，科学家们注意到，其中一些元素溶于水，而另一些则溶于油脂。于是，一位名为埃尔默•麦考伦（Elmer McCollum）的科学家便把脂溶性维生素叫做vitamins A，水溶性维生素叫做vitamins B。
The event that caused a C vitamin to be named was the same event that resulted in the word vitamin being punished with the loss of its “e”.
值得注意的是，那件导致单词vitamin受到惩罚，并最终失去字母“e”的事件，也让某一种微量元素得到了维生素C的名称。
A and B were amines, here’s another one that prevents scurvy but it isn’t an amine, better call it C.
A类和B类维生素曾被认为是不同种类的胺。然而，另一种被用来预防败血症（scurvy）的维生素却根本不是胺，将它称为维生素C会更合适一些。
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