Henry Drysdale Dakin, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

    

Henry Drysdale Dakin

British chemist

Date of Birth: 12-Mar-1880

Place of Birth: London

Date of Death: 10-Feb-1952

Profession: physician, chemist

Nationality: United Kingdom

Zodiac Sign: Pisces


Show Famous Birthdays Today, United Kingdom

👉 Worldwide Celebrity Birthdays Today

About Henry Drysdale Dakin

  • Henry Drysdale Dakin FRS (12 March 1880 – 10 February 1952) was an English chemist.He was born in London as the youngest of 8 children to a family of steel merchants from Leeds.
  • As a school boy he did water analysis with the Leeds City Analyst.
  • He studied chemistry at the University of Leeds with Julius B.
  • Cohen and after he worked with Albrecht Kossel on arginase at the University of Heidelberg he joined Columbia University in 1905, working in the lab of Christian Herter.
  • During his work on amino acids he obtained his PhD from Leeds.
  • In 1905, he was one of the first scientists to successfully synthesise adrenaline in the laboratory (see: History of catecholamine research). In 1914 he went back to England to offer his service with the war effort.
  • Due to a request for a chemist by Alexis Carrel to the Rockefeller Institute, Dakin joined Carrel in 1916 at a temporary hospital in Compiègne.
  • There they developed the Carrel–Dakin method of wound treatments.
  • This consisted of intermittently irrigating the wound with Dakin's solution, a dilute solution of sodium hypochlorite (the active ingredient in common liquid bleach products) and boric acid.
  • In the process, he analyzed more than 200 candidate substances, and developed quantitative methods to evaluate their effectiveness for disinfection and wound healing.
  • The solution is still widely used for that purpose, as of 2013.After he married the widow of Christian Herter in 1916, he worked in his private laboratory in Scarsdale, New York and had several close collaborations with other scientists.
  • His main working fields were amino acids and enzymes.
  • The extraction of amino acids from hydrolyzed peptides by butanol was invented by him.
  • He also was interested in organic chemistry and synthesis, and devised the Dakin reaction and the Dakin–West reaction. He died shortly after the death of his wife in early 1952.

Read more at Wikipedia

See Also