Nikolai Lunin (scientist)

Nikolai Ivanovich Lunin (21 May 1854 – 18 June 1937)[1] was a Russian Empire and later Soviet scientist who was the first to discover the existence of vitamins.

As a student in Basel, he fed mice on a diet of proteins, fats, sugar, salts and water, but they died.

His dissertation was published abroad in 1881, however other scientists were unable to replicate his work.

Frederick Gowland Hopkins, in his Nobel Prize lecture, references Lunin's work.

[2] Lunin is buried at Volkovo Cemetery in St Petersburg, next to his wife, who died two years before him.