George Minot

George Richards Minot (1885 to 1950) was an American physician and medical researcher at Harvard and Boston hospitals who shared the 1934 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with George Hoyt Whipple and William P. Murphy for work on pernicious anemia. Born in Boston to a physician father, he took his medical degree at Harvard in 1912, trained at Massachusetts General Hospital and Johns Hopkins, and turned to diseases of the blood. Building on Whipple's finding that a diet rich in liver stimulated blood formation in dogs, Minot and Murphy reported in 1926 that patients with pernicious anemia improved when they ate large amounts of liver each day, which turned a fatal illness into a treatable one and pointed to the shortage of what was later shown to be vitamin B12. Minot himself was diagnosed with diabetes in 1921 and lived to do this work because insulin became widely available soon afterwards. He became professor of medicine at Harvard and director of the Thorndike Memorial Laboratory, and he died in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1950. This entry records the historical work and is not medical advice.