Henry Drysdale Dakin
FRS (12 March 188010 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 conducted water analysis with the Leeds City Analyst. He studied chemistry at the
University of Leeds with
Julius B. Cohen
Julius Berend Cohen FRS (6 May 1859 in Eccles – 14 June 1935 in Coniston) was an English chemist. He studied chemistry with Hans von Pechmann at the University of Munich. One of his students was Henry Drysdale Dakin.
Biography
Julius ...
, and then 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 Dakin's solution is a dilute solution of sodium hypochlorite (0.4% to 0.5%) and other stabilizing ingredients, traditionally used as an antiseptic, e.g. to cleanse wounds in order to prevent infection.Jeffrey M. Levine (2013): "Dakin’s Solution: P ...
, a dilute solution of
sodium hypochlorite (the active ingredient in common
liquid bleach
Liquid bleach, often called just bleach, is a common chemical household product that consists of a dilute solution of sodium hypochlorite () and other secondary ingredients. It is a chlorine releasing bleaching agent widely used to whiten cloth ...
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.
The World War I era
Rockefeller War Demonstration Hospital (United States Army Auxiliary Hospital No. 1) was created, in part, to promote the Carrel–Dakin method:
"The war demonstration hospital of the Rockefeller Institute was planned as a school in which to teach military surgeons the principles of and art of applying the Carrel-Dakin treatment."
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.
References
External links
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Dakin, Henry
1880 births
1952 deaths
Fellows of the Royal Society
English chemists
Organic chemists
Rockefeller University faculty