Charles Lieber (1931-2009)
Lieber was a Belgian-born American researcher who pioneered alcohol research at a time when conventional wisdom thought alcohol was not toxic and that cirrhosis was caused by a faulty diet.
biography
Ellen Richards (1842 – 1911)
Ellen Richards has been called the most prominent American woman chemist of the 19th century. She graduated from Vassar in astronomy and chemistry, later got a master’s degree in chemistry from there and then became the first woman graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). However, she was denied a doctorate because she was a …
Doris Calloway (1923-2001)
Calloway was a prominent American nutritionist from the 1960s to the 1990s at the University of California at Berkeley. There, she and Sheldon Margen ran the “Penthouse” studies for 17 years in a three-bedroom apartment atop a university building that had originally been built to teach young women how to manage a household.
Robert B. Choate, Jr. (1924-2009)
Choate helped jump-start awareness of the nutritional content of processed food in the American diet when, at a well-publicized appearance before the U.S. Congress in 1970, he testified that 40 of the 60 leading breakfast cereals were essentially empty calories.
Nevin Scrimshaw (1918-2013)
Scrimshaw’s “revolutionary accomplishments over six decades in fighting protein, iodine, and iron deficiencies, developing nutritional supplements, educating generations of experts, and building support for continued advances in food quality have made substantial improvements in the lives of millions throughout the world,” according to the 1991 World Food Prize.
Mark Hegsted (1914-2009)
Hegsted helped develop the “Hegsted equation” which predicted the effect of dietary cholesterol, saturated fat, monounsaturated fats, and polyunsaturated fats on blood cholesterol levels. This led to dietary recommendations to reduce the consumption of saturated fat.
Justus von Liebig (1803-1873)
Liebig was one of the founders of modern chemistry, organic chemistry, and agricultural chemistry. He started the first university-based research lab at the University of Giessen in Germany, where he taught students from all over Europe.
Harvey Washington Wiley (1844-1930)
Wiley was the main force behind passage of the landmark “Pure Foods and Drugs Act” of 1906. He was a Purdue University chemist with a medical degree who had served in the Union Army during the Civil War when in 1882 at age 37 he accepted an appointment as Chief Chemist in the U.S. Department …
Jean Mayer (1920-1993)
French-born American nutritionist Jean Mayer, after a 26 year research and teaching career at Harvard University, became president of Tufts University in 1976. There he created a School of Nutrition and employed a Washington DC firm to lobby Congress to fund a research center at Tufts, now known as the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition …
John Harvey Kellogg (1852-1943)
Kellogg was an American surgeon who ran the world-famous Battle Creek Sanitarium in his hometown in Michigan for more than 50 years. There he promoted his vision of healthy living, which included vegetarianism, physical exercise, an avoidance of alcohol and tobacco, and daily water and yogurt enemas.
William B Kannel (1923-2011)
William Kannel served as the second director of the Framingham Heart Study from 1966 to 1979. In all, he spent 60 years of his life working on the Study. Under his leadership, it was expanded to a second generation of subjects, the original participants’ children and their spouses .
Denis Burkitt (1911-1993)
Denis Burkitt was an Irish missionary surgeon in Africa whose observation that populations on that continent who ate high-fiber diets were protected from colon cancer and other chronic diseases helped lead to the belief that dietary fiber is an essential component of a healthy diet.
Thomas Dawber (1913-2005)
Thomas “Roy” Dawber rescued the foundering Framingham Heart Study in 1949 and served as its first director, focusing the Study on discovering the “risk factors” –a concept he proposed–for heart disease. Then in 1966 he rescued it again after its sponsor, NIH’s National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) terminated its funding.
Agnes Fay Morgan (1884-1968)
Agnes Fay Morgan was a pioneer in the development of a university curriculum in nutrition and dietetics based on science while teaching and doing research at the University of California at Berkeley where she was chair of Home Economics from 1918 to 1954.Her own research involved the effect of food processing on nutrient retention.
E.L. Robert Stokstad (1913-1995)
Bob Stokstad isolated folic acid in pure crystalline form in 1943 while working at Lederle Laboratories in Pearl River, New York.
Christiaan Eijkman (1858-1930)
Christiaan Eijkman carried out what historian Kenneth Carpenter called “probably the most important work for the future of nutritional science to have been conducted anywhere in the world in the 1890s.” The Dutch physician stationed in Java was assigned the task of investigating the cause of beriberi and the best method of controlling it.
Harriette Chick (1875-1977)
Trained as a bacteriologist, Harriette Chick began studying nutrient deficiencies during World War I in London. After the War, she was sent to Vienna to study dietary deficiencies in children. There she and her team confirmed the therapeutic value of cod liver oil for rickets, which helped establish the role of diet in that disease. …
David Marine (1888-1976)
David Marine was a Cleveland physician who conducted a large clinical trial on iodine supplementation for the prevention of goiter that led to the fortification of salt with the mineral in the United States.
Thomas Jukes (1906-1999)
Thomas Jukes identified the B vitamin pantothenic acid from studying purified diets in chickens in the 1930s at the University of California at Davis. For 20 years, he worked at the pharmaceutical company Lederle Laboratories where he helped develop the anti-folate cancer drug methotrexate and discovered that subtherapeutic doses of antibiotics could stimulate the growth …