This... Worries me.

"I'd like to mention one interesting experiment concerned with super-vision and dietary vitamin A deprivation. One way to improve vision--even if the vision system is currently quantum-limited--is to absorb more quanta. I understand that during the war an effort was made to develop super-vision in the infrared by substituting vitamin A2 for vitamin Al in the diet, which should give a redward shift in the visual pigment absorption spectra. Experiments were done in Britain during World War II, but the project turned out to be infeasible with humans because it was difficult to induce sufficient vitamin A [deprivation] without endangering the general health of the observer. . ."

Anyway, we are back on track. I've found out I can set up a 'Limited Liability Company' with a PO Box, and a domain name and this should be enough to get past any chemical companies scrutiny 'legally'.

Some more research on the dangers of this is going to be required though. I assumed that vitamin A2 would be usable by the rest of the body in place of A1 because of the similar chemical structure. I guess not.

I'd really like to use the freedom of information act to acquire the data from the original 1940s experiments, but unfortunately I don't know what project name it was under. If anyone happens to know, please leave a comment.

Expect a bit of a delay for the next update. I'll be 'dealing with something' for the next two months, and unable to continue any research or make any progress.

Another dead end.

Dear Sir/Madam

We cannot provide you with a quote or sell you materials unless you have a legitimate address from a corporation, university, research institute or government institution. Please email us from your corporate email. A yahoo, msn, AOL, hotmail or gmail email id is not acceptable. As Corporate policy if you email us from one of the above mentioned accounts the mail is automatically sent to the trash. We do not sell to individuals. Our products are for research & development purposes only. For us to furnish you a quote and delivery time please send us the following

1. Name of the product

2. Purity required

3. CAS Number

4. Amount required

5. Our Catalog number (Please check for the latest catalog number on our website)

They wont even give me a fucking quote unless I have some kind of legitimate backing.

Here we go...

So, I've found a company that offers dehydroretinol for therapeutic purposes for 'Darier's Disease' at 95% purity.

I've asked them for a quote.... Wish me luck...

Update

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darier%27s_disease

I'm back, and there's actually some hope for this experiment after all.

Failure.

Looks like dehydroretinol synthesized in a lab is way too fucking expensive.

And the only product so far I've found that has dehydroretinol without contamination from other forms of vitamin A (beta-carotene, Retinyl palmitate, etc) in them is some kind of make-up. And I'm not about to try to eat that.

I did find out that anhydrolutein converts into dehydroretinal in mamals, but searches for that were even more futile.

So, I've followed up every lead, scoured one end of the internet to the other, poured over research documents and this is all I came up with:

>Materials. 3-Dehydroretinal was prepared from the liver oil of the Indian freshwaterfish Wallago attu (Balasundaram, Cama, Sundaresan & Varma, 1956). The livers were homogenized in a Waring Blendor and extracted repeatedly with light petroleum (b.p. 40-60°)-ether mixture. The extract was dried over anhydrous Na2SO4, filtered and reduced in volume. The concentrate was kept at - 300 overnight and the precipitated sterols were removed by filtration at -30°. The filtrate after reduction in volume in vacuo was saponified with ethanolic KOH and oxidized over MnO2 (Camaet al. 1952a). 3-Dehydroretinal was separated by chromatography on a water-deactivated alumina column. The crystalline material obtained after four crystallizations had E1% 1431 at 385m,.u in light petroleum. Oral feeding. The compound was dissolved just before use in refined deodorized groundnut oil containing 50% (w/w) of a-tocopherol.

Tl;dr - It can't be done. At least, not by me.

Sorry /x/, I have failed.

Another update

Might not need dehydroretinol after all, apparently some caroteniods convert to forms of Vitamin A in the intestines.

Seems, in fresh water fish Lutein converts dehydroretinol, but I can't find anything on this in humans.

Needs more research, but at least I have something useful to work with now.

An update.

18 July 2009 - The chemical company I was planning on ordering the Vitamin A2 from still hasn't gotten back to me.

I found a type of baby formula that contains Vitamin A2. But looks like there are some forms of Vitamin A in it as well, Beta Carotene and Vitamin A Palmitate. Not sure if this makes it completely useless to me or not, but it's better than nothing, right?

At least I now have some good leads on where to search in the future.