From At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson:
Two other vitamins — pantothenic acid and biotin — don’t have numbers or, come to that, much profile, but that is largely because they never cause us problems. No human has yet been found with insufficient quantities of either.
Poking around suggests that Bryson’s statement is not completely true. Isolated cases have been observed (usually due to a wider incidence of starvation) and the condition has been studied in mice. Intriguingly, some subjects have reported a “burning sensation” in their feet.
Which is, it turns out, the first symptom of “space scurvy”. On the first long journeys through the solar system, it was discovered that some curious interaction of solar radiation and rotationally induced “gravity” caused a breakdown of pantothenic acid. The resulting vitamin deficiency causes nausea, vomiting, and impaired mental faculties. Worse yet, victims manifest severe sleep disturbances: Think of the severe “sleep driving” side-effects of Ambien, crank them up a couple hundred degrees, and unleash them on a spaceship. Victims have been known to sleepwalk their way out of airlocks, damage ship reactors (some suggest victims of space scurvy actually have an unnatural attraction to sources of radioactivity), or simply pilot their ships into the nearest planets.
Some crazies in the Belt have actually been known to deliberately induce the deficiency disease, believing that the “pantothenic visions” have deep spiritual or religious meaning. In one well-known incident, the Bryson Colony broadcast its insane death throes throughout the entire system as a population of 166 souls commited ecstatic, prolonged suicide by way of holy vision.
