Ron:

I don't know if you have a severe reading comprehension problem of a
mental disability, because never answer the questions I ask you. I
will point a few things out, for those who don't have any such issues:

1. Burr did think he had discovered that particular fatty acids were
essential in the rat diet by 1930.

2. He did not know about vitamin B6 in the 1920s, because it was
discovered in 1934.

3. Experiments were done in the 1940s (at M.I.T.) demonstrating that
what are now called "essential fatty acids" are not essential, but
that B6 is. They even repeated their experiment to make sure they
were correct. Burr & Burr, however, did not repeat their 1930
experiment, making sure the rats had B6 in a follow-up study.

4. Burr had a student who either did not know about these M.I.T.
experiments or decided to ignore them, and proceeded to attempt to
make his career by advocating this invalid claim. I will not mention
this person's name (I believe he/she is still alive), but from my
research, I would say he/she is guilty of gross academic misconduct or
gross incompetence. My sense is that this is a major reason for the
persistence of this dangerous myth of "EFAs."

Now, Ron, if you have something of scientific merit to contribute
here, please do, but otherwise, I urge you to stop perpetuating this
dangerous myth. Aren't you supposed to be a scientist? Haven't you
pledged to "first, do no harm?"

I am copying and pasting the relevant section from a post I did early
this morning on this newsgroup, which is from the M.I.T. experiments
done in the 1940s, below.

QUOTE: [when?] fed a pyridoxine-deficient diet, rats develop
a scaliness of the paws and tails which is hardly distinguishable from
the syndrome which develops from a deficiency in "essential" fatty
acids. Others have demonstrated that pyridoxine is necessary for the
formation of fat from protein. From this we have reasoned that there
may be an interrelationship between pyridoxine and "essential" fatty
acids.

We have demonstrated that this deficiency condition can be cured
by feeding pyridoxine but that it is not affected by feeding linoleic
acid. The effects of pyridoxine have been confirmed in a repeat
experiment. The evidence indicates that pyridoxine deficiency not
only decreases the appetite of rats but also the efficiency of food
utilization. It appears that rats store only small amounts of
pyridoxine, for their growth rate was retarded within five days after
they were placed on a pyridoxic-free ration. UNQUOTE.

http://jn.nutrition.org/cgi/reprint/118/5/535.pdf gives a biography
and history of the discovery of the omega 6 essential fatty acid.

In particular it says:
"In 1924 I went to Berkeley to join Herbert Evans,
who with Katherine Scott Bishop had just recently
discovered Vitamin E. Now, just by chance, they
were having trouble with reproducibility of their basic
E-deficient diet, so the diet was simplified and pur
ified to the extreme, using reprecipitated casein and
recrystallized sucrose as main ingredients. Soon we
had an extreme deficiency different from E-deficiency.
We had run our first fat-deficiency experi
ment, and didn't know it. It never occurred to us
over four years of experiments and three papers that
this new deficiency was that of a well-known fatty
acid. We had been told on high authority that fats,
per se, were not required in the diet, and our minds
were closed. .. . After two years of work at Minne
sota, we were driven to the conclusion that the only
thing that could be missing from the diet was linoleic
acid. If, by chance?"

--
Ron