Joseph Goldberger

A Hungarian-born American physician and epidemiologist with the United States Public Health Service who established that pellagra, a disfiguring and often fatal skin disease that devastated much of the American South in the early twentieth century, was caused by dietary deficiency rather than infection. Working against the prevailing belief that pellagra was a contagious disease, Goldberger designed controlled dietary experiments among orphans, asylum patients and prisoners that demonstrated the condition could be induced and cured through diet alone, a finding that ran counter to the medical orthodoxy of his time and drew significant resistance before it was accepted. The specific missing nutrient, niacin, was not isolated until 1937, eight years after his death, but his work had already reframed pellagra as a problem of poverty and nutrition rather than contagion, and he was nominated for the Nobel Prize four times without winning.