Harry Keen

Harry Keen CBE (3 September 1925 – 5 April 2013) was an English diabetologist and a professor of human metabolism at Guy's Hospital. He was the first to identify microalbuminuria as a predictor of kidney disease in diabetics, and was an international authority on diabetes.

Early life Keen was born in 1925 in London to a Jewish family; his parents were Sydney Keen, a tailor, and Esther (née Zenober), a teacher who had migrated to the United Kingdom from Poland. He attended St Ann's School in Hanwell and Ealing County Grammar School for Boys. He studied medicine at St Mary's Hospital Medical School, graduating on 5 July 1948, the day that the National Health Service (NHS) was established. He travelled to Bethesda, Maryland, in 1960 for a year-long research fellowship at the National Institutes of Health,

When Keen returned to London from the United States in 1961, he was hired as a lecturer by Guy's Hospital and its associated medical school, where he would spend the rest of his career. which led to the creation of different glucose thresholds for microvascular and macrovascular disease. He also pioneered the concept of the insulin pump, which delivers insulin continuously to type 1 diabetics who are reliant on insulin.

Keen chaired the 1980 and 1985 World Health Organization expert committees on diabetes. He died on 5 April 2013.