A clinical nutritionist and researcher, who helped prove to the scientific world that alcoholism could be treated and helped establish alcohol research as a legitimate science, has died. Charles S. Lieber died March 1 after a long battle with stomach cancer. He was 78.Dr. Lieber's research showed that it was alcohol itself, not poor diet, that caused cirrhosis of the liver.
Before his findings, the conventional thinking was that alcoholism could not be treated. Dr. Lieber's classic 1974 experiment with baboons proved that alcohol itself was toxic to the liver and that cirrhosis was caused by alcohol consumption, not the poor nutrition commonly associated with alcoholism.
He made many of his findings on the toxic effects of alcohol at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in the Bronx.
A Giant in His Field
"He was a giant in his field, probably the most eminent in the world in alcohol and the liver," fellow alcohol researcher Steven Schenker of the University of Texas Health Science Center told the New York Times. "His concepts put him under a lot of pressure, but he defended his positions brilliantly and gentlemanly in very heated discussions with some of the brightest scientists in the world."
In 1977, Dr. Lieber used his own personal credit to help the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence begin publishing a new journal, Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, the first journal to publish alcohol research without the bias shown to such research by existing scientific journals.
News Source: New York Times.
Charles Lieber, Who Studied Alcohol as a Toxin, Is Dead at 78. 11 March 2009.
Photo: Bronx VA Hospital
