Robert R. Williams Jr. was born in 1886 in Nellore, India, the child of Baptist missionaries. Though his family returned to the United States when he was 10, he never forgot the poverty he had witnessed in India. During World War I, while working in the Philippines, he again observed poverty’s heavy toll. While there, he began searching for a cure for beriberi. In Sinhalese, beriberi means “I can’t, I can’t,” reflecting the crippling effect the disease has on its victims. Its symptoms include weight loss, emotional disturbances, impaired sensory perception, weakness and pain in the limbs, and periods of irregular heart rate and, in advanced cases, heart failure and death. The disease is common in people whose diet consist mainly of polished white rice, which is very low in thiamine. The nervous system ailment was common among the world’s poor, many of whom depend on rice as their main staple.
Roberts’ search continued after he returned to the U.S. and became chemical director of Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. Williams and colleague Robert E. Waterman, working in their spare time in a laboratory set up in Williams’ garage, isolated thiamine in crystalline form in 1933; two years later, they synthesized vitamin B1.
Altruism has always been an underlying principle of Research Corporation. At its inception, Frederick Gardner Cottrell invented the electrostatic precipitator and used the proceeds from his patent to create the foundation. Williams and Waterman followed suit, donating the majority of their patent proceeds to form the Williams-Waterman Fund for the Combat of Dietary Diseases.
The Fund’s first project was in Bataan province, the Philippines. The Second World War had devastated the Philippines. After the war ended, the Philippine Islands were in a shambles, the population battered and suffering malnutrition. In what came to be known as the “Philippine Experiment,” the Williams-Waterman Fund financed, and arranged for, the fortification of rice with thiamine, niacin and iron. The project was a huge success; by 1951, beriberi-related deaths were nonexistent in the Philippines. The Fund then helped people build mills and produce the minerals needed to continue the process. Subsequent projects took place in New Zealand, Nationalist China, Cuba, India, Chile, Brazil, Guatemala, South Africa, Argentina, Peru, Uganda and in Haiti.
From its inception in 1940, until its end in 1974, the Williams-Waterman Fund made 588 awards, totaling over $10 million (more than $80 million in 2010 dollars).