...and don't forget that Linus Pauling almost discovered the DNA structure before Watson and Crick, contributed to the development of x-ray crystallography, and won a Nobel Peace Prize for promoting nuclear disarmament. My parents had him speak in our small town in the 80s, being multi-vitamin advocates. Odd that his orthomolecular (multivitamin) advocacy seemed to be based upon empirical evidence, when he was a giant in hard scientific research. To be fair though, vitamins do play an important role in human health (by definition, they are the external things we need) but no one is sure of the dose and some efficacies may be subtle. As you said, it appears that the body's uptake of a given vitamin pill is very low.