Conrad Arnold Elvehjem (May 27, 1901July 27, 1962) was internationally known as an American biochemist in nutrition. In 1937 he identified two vitamins, nicotinic acid, also known as niacin, and nicotinamide, which were deficient directly in human pellagra, once a major health problem in the United States. Collectively, nicotinic acid and nicotinamide are termed vitamin B3 and are now understood to be precursors of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide. Biography Conrad Elvehjem, the son of Norwegian emigrants to Wisconsin, was born in McFarland, Wisconsin. He progressed through the secondary schools and the University of Wisconsin, where he received his PhD in 1927 with mentor E. B. Hart for his studies of the importance of copper in iron-deficiency anemia. A National Research Council fellowship permitted a year at Cambridge University in England. Elvehjem began teaching in agricultural chemistry at the University of Wisconsin in 1923, and became a full professor in 1936. He became chairman of the biochemistry department in 1944 and dean of the graduate school in 1946, at 45 years of age. He served as dean of the graduate school until he became the university's 13th president in 1958. Picking up on the work of Joseph Goldberger, he found that nicotinic acid cured black tongue in dogs, an analogous disease to pellagra. In the previous year, Elvehjem and his colleague Carl J. Koehn had found that a filtrate factor from a liver extract could cure diet-induced pellagra in chicks. That filtrate extract was designated as the vitamin G fraction, after the late Goldberger. To confirm their findings in dogs, they induced black tongue in these animals with the Goldberger diet of yellow corn, before supplementing the diet with the vitamin G fraction. Elvehjem and his colleagues later were able to isolate and identify nicotinamide and nicotonic acid from vitamin G as the curative factors for black tongue in dogs. He also contributed greatly to the identification of vitamin B complex and was co-author of more than 780 scientific papers on biochemistry and nutrition. Elvehjem commented frequently on nutrition as it affects both scientist and layman. "Vitamins should be obtained from natural foods if possible", he cautioned. "Generally they are cheaper, more palatable, and in better balance with other factors when taken in this form." He acknowledged the value of synthetic vitamins in treating deficiency diseases, but warned that their use should be temporary. Elvehjem's first graduate student (in 1931) was noted