Clifford Dobell

[1] Clifford Dobell was educated at Sandringham School, Southport, and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a first-class degree in natural sciences in 1906 under the tutelage of Adam Sedgwick.

During the First World War he helped military medical staff improve prevention and treatment of ailments associated with intestinal protozoa.

At this time he was, as P. O. Crossfield in the British Medical Journal later explained, "one of the first to demonstrate the existence and to appreciate the epidemiological significance of symptomless carriers of Entamoeba histolytica, whose number among the inhabitants of Great Britain he estimated at 10%.

Distinguished for the wide range of his researches on the Protista and for the skill he has shown in the investigations of their structure and life-histories (e.g., 'Copromonas subtilis', 'Chromidina', 'Entamoeba ranarum').

His researches have also thrown light upon the nucleus of the Bacteria, on the alleged sexual phenomena of the same group, and on the nature of the Spirochaets and Cyanophyceae.