Agnes Fay Morgan Achievements

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Agnes Fay Morgan is known for many things, but most importantly she is honored and praised for her accomplishments within the field of chemistry and biochemistry. Born in 1884, she was the third of four children to an Irish immigrant and was born in Peoria, Illinois. Her family consisted of two boys and two girls, where ironically, both boys didn’t attend college and both females did. Due to Agnes’s exceptional grades and limitless possibilities, she was offered a full college scholarship by a local benefactor and enrolled at Vassar College. She then continued her education by transferring to the University of Chicago where she earned both her BS degree and her MS degree in chemistry. Once obtaining this degree she decided to teach chemistry in Montana and …show more content…

Agnes was, “the first to demonstrate that a commonly used food preservative, sulfur dioxide, had a protective effect on vitamin C and a damaging effect on thiamin (King)”. She learned this by studying the vitamin content of many important California-grown foods, wheat, almonds, and walnuts, and the effects of processing them. She also was extremely interested in developing the conclusion of why there were so many low weight (underweight) children, and what the cause was driven from. Her findings from this research was praised as she concluded that small supplementary feeding with fruits, milk and wheat germ improved the growth of school children. She also found out that the over dosage of Vitamin D produced brittle bones and calcification of soft tissues. If that wasn’t enough, she continued her extensive research and showed that pantothenic acid is essential for normal pigmentation of hair and skin. Lastly she was intelligent enough to prove that the bone density of woman decreased between 50 and 65 years of

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