Nobel Prize Recipient. Henrik Dam, a Danish biochemist, received world-wide professional recognition after being awarded the 1943 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for, according to the Nobel Prize committee, his discovery of vitamin K." His find impacted medical treatment with its into antihemorrhagic properties in such conditions as Hemophilia, post-operative hemorrhaging, postpartum hemorrhaging and other cases. He received this coveted award, sharing it jointly with American biochemist, Edward Doisy. Dam received six nominations within a two-year period for the Nobel candidacy. With the unstable political environment of Europe during World War II, no Nobel Prizes were offered in the years of 1940, 1941 and 1942. He received his 1943 Nobel Prize during the December of 1944 presentation ceremony, which was held in the New York City instead of Stockholm. Born Carl Peter Henrik Dam, the son of a pharmaceutical chemist, who had authored biographic and historical books and a school teacher, he graduated with a Master's Degree from the Polytechnic Institute of Copenhagen in 1920. He then joined the Royal School of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine in Copenhagen and was a professor of chemistry in 1920 for three years. In 1923, he joined the faculty of the University of Copenhagen, an affiliation he held until 1941. He studied microchemistry at the University of Graz under 1923 Nobel Prize recipient in chemist, Fritz Pregl in 1925. Returning to Copenhagen University, he was appointed as an assistant professor at the Institute of Biochemistry in 1928. He was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship, which he used to study at the University of Freiburg in Germany with biochemist Rudolf Schoenheimer from 1932 to 1933. In 1935 he traveled to Switzerland to study under Paul Karrer, who would be the 1937 Nobel Prize in Chemistry recipient for his studies in vitamins. In 1934 he earned a PhD in biochemistry from University of Copenhagen with his thesis "Some Investigations on the Biological Significance of the Sterines." During World War II, he came to the United States, lecturing there and in Canada. Continuing his research, he held a post at Woods Hole Marine Biology Laboratory at Falmouth, Massachusetts in 1941 and from 1942 to 1945 as the senior researcher at the University of Rochester in New York. It was during this time that he received his Nobel Prize. After the war in 1946, he returned Denmark to the Polytechnic Institute. While doing experiments between 1929 and 1934, he and his colleagues demonstrated a deficiency disease of chick, which was characterized by a tendency to bleed and having an increased blood-clotting time. For the experiment, the chicks were given a fat-free diet, which increased their blood-clotting time. He theorized that the disease was caused from lack of an antihemorrhagic vitamin, which he later showed to be fat-soluble and present in green leaves. He named it vitamin K or Koagulations-Vitamin. In 1939 both he and Doisy, researching independently but coming to the same result, isolated the Vitamin K from alfalfa. Dam also did research on cholesterol metabolism, vitamin E, lipids, growth factors, and gallstone formation. In 1951, he was one of seven Nobel Laureates who attended the first Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting. From 1956 to 1963, Dam directed the biochemical division of the Danish Fat Research Institute in Copenhagen. He was honored on a stamp issued by the Maldive Islands in 1995. Besides the Nobel Prize, he was an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 1924 Dam married Inger Marie Martha Sophie Olsen and they had no children.