concluded that rats stop growing until they are fed certain "ether extracts of egg or of butter", and that "there are certain accessory articles in certain food-stuffs which are essential for normal growth for extended periods". They also found this food factor in extracts of alfalfa leaves and in organ meats. This substance that McCollum called "factor A," was later called vitamin A. McCollum and Davis, who ultimately received credit for the discovery, submitted their paper for publication three weeks before Osborne and Mendel. Both papers appeared in the same issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry in 1913. This turned out to be a very close call given that learning about vitaminA took scientists about 130 years, beginning with François Magendie in 1816 through its synthesis in 1947. Davis published with McCollum from 1909 to 1916, and Nina Simmonds did the same from 1916 to 1929. In the space of six years, McCollum was promoted from instructor to assistant professor, associate professor, and then full professor. He thought that a professor succeeds with his students, "by his ability to make his conversations and lectures more interesting than song, dance, drink and fast driving". Discovery of vitamin B Looking at beriberi and the problem of polished rice, Christiaan Eijkman and Gerrit Grijns were trying to find the cause of polyneuritis (influenced by Louis Pasteur. Eijkman thought bacteria caused beriberi), but McCollum's approach differed in that he was seeking the reason for failure in growth. McCollum and Davis's experiments with rat diets led to the discovery that Eijkman's and Grijns' anti-neuritic substance was the same as their water-soluble B (B vitamins) in 1915. The finding is number8 in their list of conclusions, "The water-soluble accessory is not the same one as is furnished by butterfat. 20 percent addition of butterfat does not induce any growth unless the other accessory is supplied." He later found that B is actually combined from many different compounds. In 1916 McCollum and Cornelia Kennedy named the factors with alphabetical letters. Opposition to the new word "vitamine" McCollum opposed Casimir Funk's 1912 name vitamines (from vital amines). They thought the prefix "vita" gave the substance too much importance, and that the ending "amine" means something specific in organic chemistry, but they only had scant evidence of one amino group. McCollum and Kennedy write in 1916 in the Journal of Biological Chemistry in their paper "The Dietary Factors