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.

This family paid for him to attend a local elite Gymnasium, where he skipped a year to compensate for lost time in refugee camps.

[1] He was hired by Manhattan's Bellevue Hospital Center in 1963, where he successfully pleaded for a grant from the National Institutes of Health which would be used for his investigations on alcohol in baboons.

He was admitted to the faculty of Bronx Veterans Affairs Medical Center and was appointed as a professor at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in 1968, where he identified the biochemical processes used in the human body to metabolize alcohol.

Other research showed that the effect of even social drinking on the liver can cause it to create toxic substances, increasing the sensitivity of even social drinkers to acetaminophen, anesthetics and certain solvents[1] Lieber found that administering antibiotics to alcoholics with liver disease caused by their condition would have less ammonia converted from urea in their stomach, which he credited to bacteria in the stomach that he had seen using his microscope and that had been killed by the antibiotic treatment.