Minot, George Richards (1885–1950)

US physician who was awarded a Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1934 with William Murphy and George Whipple for their work on the treatment of pernicious anaemia by increasing the amount of liver in the diet. Pernicious anaemia is a disease which reduces the oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood.

Whipple had previously demonstrated that anaemia might be the result of a vitamin deficiency. Working with dogs that he made anaemic by regularly drawing their blood, he discovered that more blood had to be drawn to keep the animals anaemic if they were fed liver, beef, or spinach than if they were fed salmon and bread. Minot, therefore, began advising patients with pernicious anaemia to eat beef and liver. This diet did not result in much improvement in their condition.

Then in 1925, he and Murphy performed a clinical trial in which they fed patients half a pound of lightly cooked beef liver every day. This resulted in an astonishing regeneration of the red blood cells within a single week and the continued good health of the patients while they remained on the diet of liver.

Minot was born in Boston and studied medicine at Harvard University. He worked for three years at Johns Hopkins University and then returned to a staff position at Harvard, where he began working on pernicious anaemia. Until the work of Minot in 1925, anaemia was invariably fatal.