In 1934, George Hoyt Whipple, a graduate of Yale University (A.B. 1900), was awarded the 1934 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with George R. Minot and William P. Murphy for their discoveries concerning liver therapy in cases of anaemia.

Anemia, or blood deficiency, means that the amount of red blood cells in the blood is too low. George Whipple and his colleagues drew blood from dogs and then gave them different types of food, while simultaneously studying the formation of new blood cells.

This endeavor at the beginning of the 1920s showed that formation of blood cells was stimulated by a diet rich in foods like liver, kidney, meat and apricots. This suggested avenues for treating people with a serious form of anemia, pernicious anemia, by having them daily eat abundant amounts of liver.