Israel Lyon Chaikoff (2 July 1902, in London, UK – 25 January 1966, in Berkeley, USA) was a Canadian-American physiologist and biochemist, known for the Wolff–Chaikoff effect.
[1][2] He and his colleagues were pioneers in the use of radioactive iodine (iodine-131) to investigate thyroid function.
He used radioactive carbon (carbon-14) to investigate lipogenesis and the biosynthesis and utilization of fatty acids, sterol-containing metabolites, glucose, glycogen, adrenal steroids, and thyroid hormones.
[4] A wide range of metabolic problems were studied in his laboratory and are reported in more than five hundred original papers.
He added considerably to our knowledge of the nature of thyroid hormone secretion and the effect of the pituitary and of iodine on thyroid function; many of these studies gave new insight to the nature of action of anti-thyroid drugs.