Artturi I. Virtanen

Artturi I. Virtanen (1895-1973), Finnish biochemist and Nobel Prize winner. For his discoveries with vitamins, amino acids, and many other nutritionally important components of plants, Virtanen won the 1945 Nobel Prize in chemistry.

Virtanen was born in Helsinki and was educated at the University of Helsinki where he received his master's degree in 1916 and his doctoral degree in 1919, both in chemistry. He was appointed laboratory director of the Finnish Cooperative Dairies Association in 1921, a position from which he oversaw the production of his country's milk, butter, cheese, and other dairy products. Ten years later, he was named director of the Biochemical Research Institute in Helsinki and also became a professor of biochemistry at the Finland Institute of Technology. Later he taught at the University of Helsinki from 1939 to 1948.

Throughout his life, Virtanen was interested in the nutritional aspects of agriculture and plant preservation. His first significant contributions concerned the fermentation process of certain plant acids, research that eventually proved the importance of enzymes—complex, living-cell organic catalysts—in the process of bacterial fermentation. He began to study peas, soybeans, and other legumes to see how they were able to convert nitrogen into nitrogen compounds that then enabled plant growth. In the early 1930s Virtanen's research centered on how sugars form succinate and lactate, which are types of acid salts. Through this work, he discovered how certain kinds of enzymes called proteases are released. He went on to research how the simple addition of hydrochloric and sulfuric acids to fodder stored in silos for lifestock feed helped prevent the loss of their nutritional value due to bacterial decay. Virtanen greatly expanded the field of enzymes, biological nitrogen fixation, plant chemistry and plant metabolism, and the nutritional needs of humans and animals.

A lifelong active researcher, Virtanen published a book on nutrition in animals and humans and was on the boards of several biochemical journals. He represented his country on a United Nations Commission on Nutrition and was elected president of Finland's State Academy of Science and Arts in 1948.