Carl Peter Henrik Dam (21 February 1895 – 17 April 1976) was a Danishbiochemist andphysiologist.
He was awarded theNobel Prize inMedicine in 1943 for joint work withEdward Doisy in discoveringvitamin K and its role inhumanphysiology. Dam's key experiment involved feeding acholesterol-free diet to chickens.[1] He initially replicated experiments reported by scientists at theOntario Agricultural College (OAC).[2] McFarlane, Graham and Richardson, working on the chick feed program at OAC, had usedchloroform to remove all fat from chick chow. They noticed that chicks fed only fat-depleted chow developed hemorrhages and started bleeding from tag sites.[3] Dam found that these defects could not be restored by adding purified cholesterol to the diet. It appeared that—together with the cholesterol—a second compound had been extracted from the food, and this compound was called the coagulation vitamin. The new vitamin received the letter K because the initial discoveries were reported in a German journal, in which it was designated asKoagulationsvitamin.
He received an undergraduate degree in chemistry from the Copenhagen Polytechnic Institute (now theTechnical University of Denmark) in 1920, and was appointed as assistant instructor in chemistry at the School of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine. By 1923 he had attained the post of instructor in biochemistry at theUniversity of Copenhagen's Physiological Laboratory. He studiedmicrochemistry at theUniversity of Graz underFritz Pregl in 1925, but returned to the University of Copenhagen, where he was appointed as an assistant professor at the Institute of Biochemistry in 1928, and assistant professor in 1929. During his time as professor at the University of Copenhagen he spent some time working abroad, and in 1934 submitted the thesisNogle Undersøgelser over Sterinernes Biologiske Betydning (Some Investigations on the Biological Significance of the Sterines) to the University of Copenhagen, and received the degree of PhD in biochemistry.[citation needed]
Between 1942 and 1945 Dam was a senior research associate at theUniversity of Rochester; it was during this period that he was awarded the 1943 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. In 1951, he was one of seven Nobel Laureates who attended the firstLindau Nobel Laureate Meeting.[4]
Henrik Dam on Nobelprize.org including the Nobel Lecture on 12 December 1946The Discovery of Vitamin K, Its Biological Functions and Therapeutical Application
