Background

Victor Daniel Herbert was born on February 22, 1927, in New York, United States. He was a son of Allan Charles Herbert and Rosaline Herbert, maiden name Margolis, a Russian emigrant and lawyer. He was named after the Irish-American composer, who was a distant cousin. When Victor was 10 years old, his father was killed while fighting in the volunteer Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War; Victor's mother died three years later.

Education

Victor Herbert earned a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry in 1948, a Doctor of Medicine in 1952, and a Juris Doctor in 1974 from Columbia University. In 1952-1953, he had an internship and residency at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Career

Victor Herbert began his academic career as a physician-scientist at the Albert Einstein and Mount Sinai hospitals in New York City (1955-1959), where he made his first forays into vitamin B-12 and folate research. It was there that he discovered that vitamin B-12 requires both calcium and intrinsic factor to bind to the ileal mucosa and that he developed the first microbiological assay for serum folate. In 1959, he was invited by William Castle to become his research associate and an assistant physician at the Thorndike Medical Laboratory on the Harvard medical service at Boston City Hospital. Describing his new environment as one of scientific and emotional intensity and exhilaration, Herbert made seminal discoveries about the clinical effects of folate deficiency and continued his studies of vitamin B-12 physiology during his 5 years at the Thorndike Laboratory (1959-1964). In the early 1960s, the medical ward provided the most common "laboratory" for the observant physician-scientist, and great scientific discoveries in clinical nutrition were made through well-planned and well-executed studies of patient-volunteers who exhibited classic features of poorly understood diseases. True to the best tradition of the physician-scientist, Victor Herbert, with a fellow, Ralph Zalusky, demonstrated the clinical relation of folate deficiency to megaloblastic anemia by studying a man who lived on coffee, doughnuts, and hamburgers and responded to minute (50-mg) daily doses of folic acid. At about the same time, Herbert and Zalusky made the first observations of what later came to be known as the "methyl trap" theory of the integral relation of vitamin B-12 to folate metabolism in the setting of isolated B-12 deficiency in patients with pernicious anemia. In careful and reproducible experiments, they showed that serum folate concentrations were typically normal or even high in these patients and that the concentrations fell with vitamin B-12 injections, whereas the clearance of injected folic acid, measured by the microbiological Lactobacillus casei serum folate assay over time, was prolonged and often on a plateau. Because L. casei measures methyltetrahydrofolate, Herbert proposed that this metabolically active folate is unavailable for normal metabolism, including the correction of DNA and anemia, and that it "piles up" in the serum because vitamin B-12 is required for its normal utilization. This classic clinical study spawned the vast and still ongoing field of research on the importance of the B-12-regulated transmethylation pathway for folate, homocysteine, and methionine metabolism.

To prove the link between inadequate diet and folate-deficient megaloblastic anemia, in October 1961 Herbert began his most famous prospective experiment, with himself as the only subject, in which he consumed for the next 5 months a diet that consisted mainly of thrice-boiled vegetables. As he described in his classic publication and related to a New York Times reporter 2 decades later, during these 22 weeks, he had his fellow Louis Sullivan perform 8 separate substernal bone marrow aspirations as well as multiple venipunctures to carefully catalog the progression of folate deficiency to its endpoint of megaloblastic anemia. Midway through the experiment, Herbert awoke on Christmas Day 1961 unable to walk. Realizing that potassium could be leached out of his diet by its bizarre preparation and that muscle weakness could be caused by potassium deficiency, he downed as much saturated potassium iodide cough syrup as he could find at home until the diagnosis could be confirmed and treated by a colleague. This experiment set the stage for the vast literature on human folate metabolism and deficiency that appeared over the next 40 years. While conclusively proving that megaloblastic anemia can indeed be caused by an improper diet, Herbert's study showed how to interpret diagnostic tests during the sequential clinical stages of the development of folate deficiency. Because the amount of folate in the human liver was generally known, Herbert's self-experiment established a reasonable estimate of the minimal daily folate requirement and hence the daily loss in a healthy man, which has been validated several times since by others with the use of sophisticated isotopic studies.

During this time, Victor Herbert found that folate deficiency was widespread among derelict alcoholics, who are notorious for poor diet, a finding that set the stage for a whole body of literature by himself and others on the relation of alcohol consumption and folate metabolism. An intriguing and yet unexplained finding resulted from an experiment in 3 alcoholic patients with megaloblastic anemia in which Sullivan and Herbert showed that an initial positive response to minute doses of folic acid could be completely and reproducibly suppressed by whiskey or wine in their typically excessive amounts. In a brief autobiographical sketch, Herbert described how one of the patient-volunteers "leapt like a cat" on a National Institutes of Health inspector who came to Boston to find out why this research group was spending so much government money on Hiram Walker Imperial Whiskey.

On his departure from the Thorndike Laboratory, Herbert became the associate director of hematology at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. After short forays to several other institutions, in 1970 he settled into a 32-y career as chief of the Hematology and Nutrition Research Laboratory at the Bronx Veterans Administration Hospital and professor of medicine at Mt Sinai School of Medicine. Over these 3 decades, he trained many future academic scientists and continued to make vast contributions to our understanding of the basic biochemistry, clinical diagnosis, and significance of vitamin B-12 and folate deficiency. A non-exhaustive list of seminal findings emanating from his laboratory includes refinements of assays for serum and red cell folate and vitamin B-12, the usefulness of the deoxyuridine (dU)-suppression test to distinguish vitamin B-12 from folate deficiency, demonstration of the essentiality of the intrinsic factor for ileal absorption as well as gastric binding of vitamin B-12, the complex transfer of vitamin B-12 from R binder to intrinsic factor, the clinical importance of vitamin B-12 analogs, and the significance of low transcobalamin II as an early marker of vitamin B-12 deficiency. Much of this work is summarized in his 1986 American Society for Clinical Nutrition Herman Award lecture on the folate and vitamin B-12 paradigm.

Herbert's scientific work was paralleled by a second career as a physician-attorney. Well before alternative medicine crept into the lexicon of medical practice, Herbert obtained a law degree and with that and his expertise as a nutrition scientist, he challenged the "health food" and "phony drug" industries. From then on, his curriculum vitae is fertilized with a seemingly endless barrage of scientific papers, letters to the editor, and columns in the lay press on the dangers of phony drugs and vitamins such as laetrile and pangamic acid or "vitamin B-15," on the wastefulness and dangers of megavitamins, and on the burgeoning herbal and health food industry. He was a frequent witness to Congress on health and nutrition and the author of numerous books that debunked the health-supplement industry. He was the author of the classic book, Nutrition Cultism: Facts & Fictions, described by The New England Journal of Medicine as, "a must for all readers who value the importance of nutrition in public health but are chagrined by the pretenders who exploit the public with food frauds, dietary cures, and nutrition nonsense." At the same time, he also provided sensible and accurate nutritional advice to laypeople.

Herbert's career also included working as an assistant instructor and research fellow at Albert Einstein College of Medicine from 1955 to 1957, as a research assistant in hematology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine from 1958 to 1959, where he was also a professor of medicine in 1964. He joined the faculty at Columbia University as an associate clinical professor in 1964, becoming a clinical professor of medicine and pathology from 1970 to 1972; and in 1976 he became professor, vice chairman of the department of medicine, and attending physician at the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center. He retired in 1984.

Although accomplished in all things scientific and legal, Victor Herbert was most proud of his career as a young paratrooper in World War II (1944-1946) and later as a medical officer during the Korean (1953-1954), Vietnam (1964-1966), and Gulf (1991) wars. Even while he was establishing his academic career at Mount Sinai, he reenlisted at age 37 in the United States Army, in the Special Forces (Green Berets), and served 122 days on active duty during the Vietnam War. After his discharge from the Army as a Lieutenant Colonel in 1987, he reenlisted yet again, at age 64, for a brief stint during the Gulf War.

Achievements

• Victor Herbert's experiments showed that a shortage of folic acid (folate) found in leafy vegetables and fruits caused a type of anemia. His discovery led to the realization that the anemia once common in pregnant women was due to a dietary deficiency. As a result, many today take folic acid to help the fetus develop. Herbert was the author of more than 850 scientific papers on a wide range of medical topics. He was a much sought after lecturer at medical institutions across the country and around the world. In 1986, Herbert was profiled in "Who Goes First? The Story of Self-Experimentation in Medicine," by New York Times medical writer Dr. Lawrence K. Altman, for his pioneering work in folic acid. Later he was the subject of a feature article in the New York Times Magazine (April 6, 1986). He earned many awards for nutrition research.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Vitamin Pushers

    (Barrett and Herbert present a detailed and comprehensive ...)

    1994
  • Total Nutrition: The Only Guide You'll Ever Need - From The Mount Sinai School of Medicine

    (This book is the thinking person's guide to nutrition wit...)

    1995
  • Genetic Nutrition: Designing a Diet Based on Your Family Medical History

    (In the barrage of nutrition advice we hear, one crucial f...)

    1993
  • Vitamins and Health Foods

    (The book examines the health foods industry, laetrile, ho...)

    1981

Membership

• 

  Victor Herbert was the president of the American Society for Nutrition in 1980-1981.

  American Society for Nutrition , United States

  1980 - 1981

• 

  Victor Herbert was a Public Information Committee chair of the Federation of the American Societies for Experimental Biology.

  Federation of the American Societies for Experimental Biology , United States

  1983 - 1986

• Interagency Committee for Human Nutrition Research , United States

• 

  Victor Herbert served on the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Academy of Sciences and its RDA Committee.

  National Academy of Sciences , United States

• 

  For five years, Victor Herbert was a Committee on Life Sciences chair of the American Bar Association.

  American Bar Association , United States

Interests

• theatre

• Sport & Clubs

  judo

Connections

Victor Herbert was married to Marilynne Herbert. They had two daughters: Alissa and Laura. He also had two sons Robert and Steven and a daughter, Kathy Rose, from a previous marriage.

Father:

Allan Charles Herbert

Mother:

Rosaline Herbert

Wife:

Marilynne Herbert

Son:

Robert Herbert

Son:

Steven Herbert

Daughter:

Kathy Rose Herbert

Daughter:

Alissa Herbert

Daughter:

Laura Herbert

colleague:

Ralph Zalusky

Ralph Zalusky was a United States physician, educator, and author. His early academic success led to an undergraduate degree at Brown University and the decision to pursue his two lifelong passions: medicine and teaching. He received his Doctor of Medicine from the Boston University School of Medicine in 1957 and did his internship and residency at Duke University Hospital in Durham, where he met and married Marian Shayon. He then returned to Boston to complete a fellowship at Boston City Hospital (Harvard University) in 1961. Subsequently, he had the privilege of working in William Castle's Thorndike Laboratory, also in Boston, where he studied pernicious anemia among many colleagues who would become deans of American investigative medicine. Fulfilling his service to the nation as a captain in the United States Air Force, he joined Stanley Schultz in the fall of 1962 at the Department of Bionucleonics of the School of Aerospace Medicine in San Antonio (brooks AFB) and co-authored a seminal work on the physiology of membrane ion transport in 1964. Zalusky moved to New York in 1965, where he served on the staff at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens before joining the Department of Hematology at Mount Sinai Hospital and then the Beth Israel Hospital in New York City, where he specialized in the treatment of aplastic anemia, Leukemia, and Lymphoma. Throughout his illustrious career, he was recognized and respected as an educator, at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and most recently, from 1994 until his retirement in 2009, as Associate Chairman of Medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (Yeshiva University, Bronx). He also co-authored over fifty publications in numerous medical journals.

colleague:

William Bosworth Castle

William Bosworth Castle spent his entire haematological career at the Harvard Medical Unit and Thorndike Memorial Laboratory at Boston City Hospital during the golden age of haematology. Castle's experiments in solving the puzzle of pernicious anaemia by identifying the intrinsic factor are models of clinical investigation and marked a new era in haematology. His insatiable curiosity about the mechanisms of disease, his ability to design and conduct simple experiments to test hypotheses, and his ability to attract clinical investigators to the Thorndike Laboratory, and inspire them and make them feel like intellectual equals, fuelled the dramatic output of seminal work on nutritional anaemias, haemolysis, splenic function, haemoglobin physiology and coagulation.