Charles S. Lieber

Charles Saul Lieber (February 13, 1931 – March 1, 2009) was a Belgian-American clinical nutritionist who established that excess alcohol consumption can cause cirrhosis of the liver even in subjects who have an adequate diet, contradicting then-current scientific opinion.

Early life Lieber was born on February 13, 1931, in Antwerp, Belgium. In 1942, he was forced to flee with his family to France, and later Switzerland, as World War II bloomed. He spent most of the war with a childless Swiss family in Winterthur that had taken him in from a refugee camp. This family paid for him to attend a local elite Gymnasium, where he skipped a year to compensate for lost time in refugee camps. While in medical school, Lieber's gastric ulcer led him to investigate its causes.

Career

He continued research at University of Brussels after graduation, until a fellowship took him to Boston City Hospital and Harvard University. There he was troubled by the belief in the profession that cirrhosis in alcoholics was caused by malnutrition and not alcohol itself, having seen alcoholics in Belgium who had liver disease even with a proper diet and based on research by Dr. Charles Best (co-discoverer of insulin) that showed that alcohol had no greater an effect in rats than sugar water. Lieber pursued Best's theory that excessive amounts of alcohol damaged the liver.

Other research performed by Lieber showed that hepatitis could be triggered by consumption of alcohol. He pioneered the therapeutic use of the coenzyme S-Adenosyl methionine as a therapeutic means to prevent liver toxicity. Lieber was survived by his second wife, Dr. Maria Leo-Lieber, as well as three daughters, two sons and six grandchildren. His earlier marriage, to Adele Tornhadjm, ended in divorce.