David Lester (biochemist)


David Lester was an American biochemist who did extensive studies of alcoholism and was a professor at Rutgers University.

Life and career

He was scientific director of the Center for Alcohol Studies after it moved to Rutgers in 1962. From 1940 to 1980, he was an editorial board member of the Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol, based at the Center for Alcohol Studies.
In 1938 he married Ruth Weiss. After they moved to Princeton in 1962, she became an assistant editor of the Papers of Thomas Jefferson at Princeton University.

Acetanilide studies

In 1946-1947, while studying at Yale, he coauthored with Leon Greenberg a series of three papers on acetanilide, an analgesic that was still in use at the time, aiming to establish why it caused methemoglobinemia. Although more than half a century had passed since acetanilide was first used clinically, there was wide-ranging disagreement concerning its metabolism, and numerous theories had been postulated. The first of these three papers summarized these theories, and reexamined the proportion of various acetanilide metabolites in human urine. Finding that p-aminophenol conjugates were excreted, they refuted the earlier theories that the accumulation of this substance in the body was causing methemoglobinemia. Of far greater impact was the second paper in this series, showing that paracetamol was a metabolite of acetanilide in the blood. The third paper in the series reported that even large amounts of paracetamol did not produce methemoglobinemia in albino rats. This observation, together with later studies conducted by Bernard Brodie and Julius Axelrod led to the rediscovery of paracetamol as a drug.