Background
He was born on October 16, 1875 in Ash Grove, Virginia, United States, the son of Franklin Sherman, a farmer, and Caroline Matilda Clapp Alvord Sherman.
He was born on October 16, 1875 in Ash Grove, Virginia, United States, the son of Franklin Sherman, a farmer, and Caroline Matilda Clapp Alvord Sherman.
He received his early education in a one-room country school and attended the Maryland Agricultural College (now the University of Maryland), obtaining the B. S. in 1893 in general science and chemistry. For the next two years he pursued graduate studies at the school of the state chemist of Maryland. In 1895 he obtained a fellowship at Columbia University, from which he received the M. S. in 1896 and the Ph. D. in 1897.
During 1898-1899 and for several subsequent summers, Sherman served as assistant to W. O. Atwater at Wesleyan University, where he worked on energy metabolism and nutrition studies. His professional career from 1899 was spent entirely at Columbia. He became lecturer in chemistry (1899 - 1901), instructor (1901 - 1905), adjunct professor of analytical chemistry (1905 - 1907), professor of organic analysis (1907 - 1911), professor of food chemistry (1911 - 1924), and Mitchill professor of chemistry (1924 - 1946). He was chairman of the chemistry department from 1919 to 1939.
His association with Atwater, a pioneer in the quantitative study of foods and nutrition in the United States, stimulated his interest in the field of food chemistry, while Columbia afforded him the opportunity to offer a course on the subject and to develop a research program on the analysis of fats, oils, and food products. Thirty-six of his early papers (1895 - 1910) deal with food analysis.
In 1910 Sherman turned to the chemistry of enzymes and proteins. He provided experimental evidence that enzymes are essentially pure protein in nature, a disclosure contrary to the views of many chemists. Between 1910 and 1934 he did research on the properties, activity, and purification of the digestive enzymes; on the efficiency of proteins in the human diet; and on the protein requirements of man. In 1925 he demonstrated that cystine was an essential amino acid. Sherman began studies on the requirements and functions of these nutrients. He developed life-span studies of animals in order to determine the effects that ensued from adding known quantities of specific nutrients to the diet.
In Science of Nutrition (1943) he declared that spinach did not have the health-building properties attributed to it and was a poor nutritional choice among green-leaf vegetables.
During the 1920's and 1930's, Sherman's laboratory at Columbia was largely responsible for the quantitative bioassay of many vitamins. Sherman recognized the need to develop reliable methods of analysis for these conjectured nutrients. The techniques for assaying for vitamins A, B1, B2, and C that he developed between 1922 and 1931 were widely adopted. His work on vitamin D, in which he discovered a way to induce and control rickets experimentally, was the basis for much of the investigation of this vitamin.
Because of his outstanding work in food chemistry and nutrition, Sherman was asked to serve on many research programs and organizations in the health field. He was an associate of the Carnegie Institution from 1912 to 1929 and from 1933 to 1939. In 1917 he was a member of the American Red Cross Mission sent to Russia to study the food situation. He was chief of the Bureau of Human Nutrition of the United States Department of Agriculture (1943 - 1944) and also served as president of the American Institute of Nutrition (1931-1933, 1939 - 1940) and of the American Society of Biological Chemists (1926).
He retired from Columbia in 1946. He died in Rensselaer, New York.
Henry Clapp Sherman himself became known internationally for his precise quantitative studies of vitamins, minerals, and other essential nutrients. He provided early evidence that enzymes such as amylase could consist of pure protein and pioneered quantitive studies on the physiological impact of vitamin A, B1, B2, C calcium, phosphorus, iron and protein. He also established the average human requirements for calcium, phosphorus, and iron. His textbooks on nutrition were widely used, particularly the Chemistry of Food and Nutrition, Methods of Organic Analysis, The Vitamins. In 1934 Sherman received the Nichols Medal of the American Chemical Society for his vitamin researches.
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Shy and retiring, Sherman appeared to be a lonely man. He attended scientific meetings as infrequently as possible and remained aloof and self-effacing.
On September 9, 1903, Sherman married Cora Aldrich Bowen, the daughter of a physician from Providence. Of their four children, one, Caroline, became a biochemist and an expert on nutrition and collaborated with her father in his studies on calcium retention. She was also co-author of two of his books. His other children: Phoebe (deceased, 1929), Henry Alvord (chemical engineer), William Bowen (medicine, deceased, 1971).
