No "Average Man" Biochemist: all men need the same vitamins and minerals, they do not need them in the same amounts or the same proportions.

From Time Magazine:
Source: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,814891,00.html#ixzz17pkDrybZ

Most physicians are convinced that alcoholism is, at bottom, a psychological disorder. Roger John Williams, famed biochemist of the University of Texas, had a different theory. The trouble, he argued might have a physical basis. Now, in Nutrition and Alcoholism (University ol Oklahoma; $2), Williams suggests that vitamins have achieved history's first honest-to-goodness cure in a case of alcoholism, making the patient truly able to take a drink or leave it.
Williams believes that while all men need the same vitamins and minerals, they do not need them in the same amounts or the same proportions. Many human disorders, he thinks, arise because some people (partly because of heredity) need some life-essential substances in far greater quantities than normal diets supply.

No "Average Man." No man was better equipped than Roger Williams to show what vitamins could do. The younger (58) brother of Robert Runnels Williams of B1 and beriberi fame (TIME, April 30), he identified pantothenic acid and helped to discover folic acid, two of the vitamins in the B complex, did pioneering work on several of the others. Along the way, Roger Williams became distressed by the way science tends to deal with the nonexistent "average man," plumped for a science of "humanics" in which differences among men, rather than similarities, would be emphasized.

This Roger Williams is the younger brother of the man who discovered beriberi. That's exciting to me, seriously. All my young life, my mother would teasingly say stuff like "don't eat the white rice, you'll get beriberi." It's no wonder, I've never enjoyed rice and barely eat it. White or brown, not my thing. I learned a lot about nutrition and, strangely, a lot about food poisoning, growing up in my home.