Charles Cameron Donald Shute

Charles Cameron Donald Shute (1917–1999) was an English physician and academic, known for his research on neurotransmitters and the McCollough effect.

Early life He was the son of Amy Bertha Ernestine Pepper-Staveley (1878–1958), known as Mrs. Cameron Shute as a writer, and her second husband Cameron Dinsdale Deane Shute, for a short period an army officer; the writer Nerina Shute was his elder sister. His parents separated when he was two years old. His mother left the country, and Charles Shute was fostered by his godmother Kathleen Cross.

Shute attended Stoke House prep school in Seaford, Sussex, and in 1930 won a scholarship to Eton College. Nerina commented "My brother had little love as a child, but a good education, I had plenty of love but little education." Ultimately he was adopted by his godmother.

Cambridge and medicine In 1936 Shute was admitted to King's College, Cambridge, with an exhibition awarded for mathematics. He studied for two years for Part I English in the Tripos, then two years for the Part I prelim in the Moral Sciences Tripos (philosophy) with an Eton minor scholarship in 1939, gaining respective classes of 2:1 and first, and graduating B.A. in 1940, M.A. in 1944. During the war, he was a conscientious objector and served with the Friends' Ambulance Unit. He went on to be a medical student at Cambridge in 1945 and at Middlesex Hospital in 1946, where he was a house surgeon in 1947. He joined the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1948, by way of doing his National Service, in an otorhinolaryngology unit. In 1949 he lectured in anatomy at the Middlesex and the London Hospital. They studied acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter, by means of thinly sliced rat brain. When she took a post at Emory University, he went with her, worked on Egyptian mathematics, and spent the rest of his life in the United States, dying in Atlanta, Georgia on 2 January 1999. He married, secondly in 1954, Lydia May Harwood (Wendy), with whom he had three daughters and a son. They were divorced in 1980.