ABSTRACT
In 1876, John Priestley of Manchester reported on the toxicity of sodium vanadate in frogs, pigeons, guinea pigs, rabbits, dogs, and cats (1). However, a paper considered to be a classic for the pharmacologic and toxicologic actions of vanadium appeared in 1912 (2). It was also at this time that high vanadium concentrations were discovered in the blood of ascidian worms (3,4). In 1977, Cantley et al. (5) reported that vanadate was the contaminant of ATP which inhibits ATPases; actually, the discovery that vanadate inhibits ATPase was made earlier (6) but was essentially ignored. In the early 1980s, vanadium was found to be an insulin-mimetic agent (7,8). The first vanadium-containing enzyme, a bromoperoxidase from the marine alga Ascophyllum nodosum, was isolated in 1984 (9).
