The story goes that Szent-Gyorgyi did not like paprika and so took his plate of paprika pods into his laboratory, not wanting to offend his wife. As he looked at the mound of peppers, he realized that he had never tested the pepper for its compounds. The results surprised him. He found that a paprika pepper contained 5-6 times more vitamin C than an orange or lemon. For the next few weeks he had turned his place into a paprika-mashing center, involving his assistants and his entire family. He extracted and filled flask after flask, each of 50-liter capacity. In one week alone, he managed to extract half a kilogram of pure vitamin C, an unthinkable quantity at the time.

Szent-Gyorgyi named it ascorbic acid (a-scorbic) because it cured scorbutic disease (scurvy). In 1937 Szent-Gyorgyi received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, in part for his isolation of vitamin C from paprika.