Charles E. Dent

Charles Enrique Dent CBE (born August 25, 1911 in Burgos , † September 19, 1976 ) was a British biochemist .

Dent was born in Spain to an Englishman (who was a government chemist in Singapore) and a Spanish woman. After the family moved to England, he attended Wimbledon College and worked in a bank from 1927 before becoming a laboratory technician attending night school at Regent Street Polytechnic in London. From 1930 he studied chemistry at Imperial College London with a doctorate in 1934. The subject of his dissertation was a blue dye that was marketed by Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI). After his doctorate, Dent worked in dye development at ICI in Manchester. In 1937 he began studying medicine at University College London, graduating in 1944 (after which he was Thomas Lewis's House Physician ). During the Second World War he worked as a chemist for the British government as a specialist in secret inks. Shortly after the war, on behalf of the British government, he studied the treatment of malnourished prisoners in the liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp with amino acids. In 1946/47 he was at the University of Rochester with a Rockefeller scholarship and researched the amino acid metabolism and its diseases. In 1949 he received his MD and was from 1951 a reader at University College Hospital with its own department for metabolic diseases. In 1956 he became a professor.

A hereditary disease of the kidneys was named Dent syndrome ( Dent's Disease ) by his student Oliver Wrong (first described by Dent in 1964).

In 1965 he received the Canada Gairdner International Award . In 1954 he became a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and in 1962 a Fellow of the Royal Society . In 1956 he became a CBE .

Web links

• English biography